In addition to the band's latest full-length Beware The Sword You Cannot See, we also just picked up the preceding 2012 album A Shadowplay For Yesterdays from this strange steampunk-tinged black metal band. Envisioning themselves as characters from some late 19th century Victorian tragedy with names like Mister Curse, The Gentleman, Mr. T.S. Kettleburner, and Katheryne, Queen of the Ghosts (the latter actually being Kati Stone of My Dying Bride), A Forest Of Stars delivers an imaginative and anachronistic mix of withering black metal, Dickensian imagery, early 70's British folk rock influences, and epic prog rock that could only have come out of England. Released as both a standard jewel case edition and a deluxe digipack version that includes an embellished booklet and bonus track "Dead Love" that's only available on this and the double LP versions of the album.

England has certainly produced it's share of eccentric, unusual black metal outfits, with the likes of Meads Of Asphodel and Fen bringing a distinctly English touch to their often offbeat and atmospheric music. The Yorkshire band A Forest Of Stars, though, might be the most British sounding band I've heard from the region, delivering an offbeat combination of ragged black metal, psychedelic folk influences, and a weird obsession with Victorian-era aesthetics that's pretty unique . They start to build an ominous and dramatic feel with the spoken word narrative that's delivered over the atmospheric ambience of opener "Directionless Resurrectionist", but follow that up with the snarling, maudlin black metal of "Prey Tell Of The Church Fate"; shrill, eerie tremolo riffs wind into eerie folk-like melodies against the background, before the band blasts into a vicious blur of jangly, blackened guitars and rickety blastbeats, continuing to maintain that strange, antiquated vibe. That's in large part due to how A Forest of Stars weaves violin, flute, piano, acoustic guitar, old-style frame drums and tambourines into their ragged black metal, both over the band's ferocious blasting and in the spaces between, and the result on this and the rest of the album sounds incredibly rustic. This stuff is possessed with a gloomy grandeur, rumbling with massive double bass driven power and slipping into stretches of harrowing blackened despair, and passages of pure prog that take over songs like "A Prophet For A Pound Of Flesh", sending swirling kosmische synths washing over long, almost krautrock-esque rhythmic workouts, Katheryne's bewitching singing drifting in over those mesmeric sprawls, intertwining with Curse's gravelly croon to produce stirring vocal harmonies. They employ strange electronic textures and synth noise to create some really immersive soundscapes, and gloriously weird moments like the dread-filled funereal oompah of "Gatherer Of The Pure" that suddenly ascends into almost Floydian spaciness. I'm not the biggest fan of music that combines folk elements with black metal, but what makes this work is how ragged and vicious the black metal aspects of their sound are, delivering a raw and vicious black metal attack that contrasts well with the more psychedelic elements. All throughout Shadowplay, the sounds of funerary violins and psychedelic folk wafting from out of their majestic, weirdly rustic metal, and it gets pretty damn catchy, shot through with more than a few moments of seriously striking dark beauty and power, while also maintaining that haunting, twilight vibe through all of their songs.

     In addition to the band's latest full-length Beware The Sword You Cannot See, we also just picked up the preceding 2012 album A Shadowplay For Yesterdays from this strange steampunk-tinged black metal band. Envisioning themselves as characters from some late 19th century Victorian tragedy with names like Mister Curse, The Gentleman, Mr. T.S. Kettleburner, and Katheryne, Queen of the Ghosts (the latter actually being Kati Stone of My Dying Bride), A Forest Of Stars delivers an imaginative and anachronistic mix of withering black metal, Dickensian imagery, early 70's British folk rock influences, and epic prog rock that could only have come out of England. Released as both a standard jewel case edition and a deluxe digipack version that includes an embellished booklet and bonus track "Dead Love" that's only available on this and the double LP versions of the album.

     England has certainly produced it's share of eccentric, unusual black metal outfits, with the likes of Meads Of Asphodel and Fen bringing a distinctly English touch to their often offbeat and atmospheric music. The Yorkshire band A Forest Of Stars, though, might be the most British sounding band I've heard from the region, delivering an offbeat combination of ragged black metal, psychedelic folk influences, and a weird obsession with Victorian-era aesthetics that's pretty unique . They start to build an ominous and dramatic feel with the spoken word narrative that's delivered over the atmospheric ambience of opener "Directionless Resurrectionist", but follow that up with the snarling, maudlin black metal of "Prey Tell Of The Church Fate"; shrill, eerie tremolo riffs wind into eerie folk-like melodies against the background, before the band blasts into a vicious blur of jangly, blackened guitars and rickety blastbeats, continuing to maintain that strange, antiquated vibe. That's in large part due to how A Forest of Stars weaves violin, flute, piano, acoustic guitar, old-style frame drums and tambourines into their ragged black metal, both over the band's ferocious blasting and in the spaces between, and the result on this and the rest of the album sounds incredibly rustic. This stuff is possessed with a gloomy grandeur, rumbling with massive double bass driven power and slipping into stretches of harrowing blackened despair, and passages of pure prog that take over songs like "A Prophet For A Pound Of Flesh", sending swirling kosmische synths washing over long, almost krautrock-esque rhythmic workouts, Katheryne's bewitching singing drifting in over those mesmeric sprawls, intertwining with Curse's gravelly croon to produce stirring vocal harmonies. They employ strange electronic textures and synth noise to create some really immersive soundscapes, and gloriously weird moments like the dread-filled funereal oompah of "Gatherer Of The Pure" that suddenly ascends into almost Floydian spaciness. I'm not the biggest fan of music that combines folk elements with black metal, but what makes this work is how ragged and vicious the black metal aspects of their sound are, delivering a raw and vicious black metal attack that contrasts well with the more psychedelic elements. All throughout Shadowplay, the sounds of funerary violins and psychedelic folk wafting from out of their majestic, weirdly rustic metal, and it gets pretty damn catchy, shot through with more than a few moments of seriously striking dark beauty and power, while also maintaining that haunting, twilight vibe through all of their songs.

Oh man, did I love Abyssal's Novit Enim Dominus Qui Sunt Eius. The secretive British blackened death metal band's second album (and first for Profound Lore) delivered a surreal, swirling mass of sound that I described as falling in some weird, warped chasm in between the cacophonic murk of bands like Portal, Impetuous Ritual, Antediluvian and Mitochondrion, and the hallucinatory, experimental quality of some of Blut Aus Nord's material. Well, we're still adrift in that same black sea of dissonant heaviness, but Abyssal's songwriting has evolved considerably since that previous album. Antikatastaseis sucked me into it's yawning black gulfs as soon as I hit play, the blasting violence of "I Am The Alpha And The Omega" swarming over the listener as a mass of brutal scattershot blastbeats that break apart into that fractured Incantational undertow that is a hallmark of Abyssal's sound, the song lurching through some disorienting time signature changes and stuttering blast-attacks even as the churning atonal riffs drown in downtuned distortion and evolve into surprisingly affecting melody; the latter half of this opening track alone is one of the most intense pieces of death metal I've heard lately, shifting from a thunderous climax into a stunning vapor-trail of achingly beautiful gothic organ.

And from there it moves into the sound of tribal drums and monstrous chanting, but demented and delirious and possessed of a strange, almost industrial-tinged atmosphere, before abruptly exploding into a vicious atonal assault, crushing heaviness spiked with that dissonant guitar sound, weaving fast and erratic through that spluttering but crushing rhythmic chaos. And once again it finds its way into passages of soaring melodic power, a recurring theme throughout Antikatastaseis, the music moving through breathtaking widescreen melodic majesty, but also rife with moments where Abyssal's black churn downshifts into a titanic doom-laden riff, and it's pulverizing in its heaviness; but there's also a lot of space, places where that violent blasting pulls apart into intense minimalist drone and stretches of light-devouring, jet-black ambience, parts where it sounds more like Shinjuku Thief than death metal, and delicate melodies creep from the depths in the quietest moments, like the tinny music-box melody that haunts the middle of "Veil Of Transcendence", continuing to play even as the band roars back in with their bulldozing deathchurn and blasting, that tiny melody repeating eerily throughout the entire rest of the song in spite of the crazed sonic violence that surrounds it, until it finally synchs with another utterly triumphant riff to powerful effect. Plenty of contemporary death/black metal outfits incorporate abstract soundscapery in their work to varying success, but Abyssal's rumbling drones and warped black ambience seamlessly integrates with the contorted doom-laden heaviness, or the propulsive progginess of "Chrysalis", or the climactic wall of sound of "Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscas" that starts off as an almost Penderecki-esque wash of terrifying dissonance but transforms into a brutal, segmented deathblast. A kind of epic, blackened prog-death steeped in existential horror and executed with exquisite craftsmanship, gleaming with moments of striking majesty, and capped off with awesome cover art that perfectly evokes the lightless oceanic gulfs traversed in Abyssal's music.

Finally back in stock!

There was lots of strange musics that appeared on the periphery of black metal in the early 1990's, projects that were intrinsically linked to the black metal scene in one way or another but whose music didn't sound anything like actual black metal, at least not the kind of black metal that was becoming popular in the extreme metal underground. One of the best and most obvious examples of this kind of necro-mutation continues to be Abruptum, whose mix of deformed improvised riffing and crawling dungeon ambience went way over the heads of many fans of traditional Scandinavian black metal. Even more obscure was the band Aghast, a Norwegian duo of two women who only played together for a brief period of time and released just one album during their short existence, a limited edition release called Hexerei Im Zwielicht Der Finsternis that came out on the Swedish industrial label Cold Meat Industry in 1995, and which has been an extremely difficult album to track down ever since.

Not only did the ladies of Aghast come out of the early Norwegian lack metal scene, they were actually married to some of the most influential members of the scene at that time, Andrea Haugen (who would later go on to form the band Hagalaz Runedance) to Samoth from Emperor, and Tanja Stene to Fenriz from Darkthrone; you might also recognize Tanja Stene as the artist behind some of the iconic album artwork for Darkthrone, Burzum and Ulver from the early 90's, and it's safe to say that she's probably much more recognized for her contributions to early black metal art than her forays into ghostly black ambience. But Aghast's music is truly amazing stuff, and it was a crime that their album slipped into total obscurity for so long. At long last, Hexerei has finally been reissued, via Eternal Pride, and it's an amazing piece of nocturnal dread that fans of the more ambient ends of the avant-garde black metal spectrum, black ambience, and experimental horror film music will all fall in love with. The sound of Aghast is a mix of spectral, minimal synths, ghostly female vocals, and extreme layers of echo and other fx, but the way that Aghast shapes this sound into their mesmeric stygian drift is pretty unique. Heavy sheets of minimal low-end and swells of pulsating rumble drift slowly through expanses of vast emptiness, and above this dark ambience float dreamy female vocals, which vary from lusty narcotized moans to hair-raising witch-shrieks, echo-drenched chanting and demonic howls, like hearing Diamanda Galas leading a series of occult rituals in a huge cavern deep beneath the earth.

The music is sparse but chilling, with stretches of near silence opening up between the sounds of chimes and swells of orchestral strings, minimal violins and thick foglike ambience, everything obfuscated by a murky quality that gives the impression that this music has been moldering and decaying for years. Most of the music is without percussion, save for one track: "Totentanz", the most terrifying track on the album. Here, Aghast lay down a pounding tattoo of tympani drums that rumble beneath the sounds of wailing, laughing witches and processed strings, and it sounds a lot like the more percussive pieces from Goblin's fearsome soundtrack for Susperia, and I'd recommend Hexerei alone just for this awesome piece of psychedelic witch-ambience. But the whole album is fantastic, definitely very black and evil sounding and occulted, but unlike any other black ambient project that I can think of - really, the closest comparison that pops into my head when listening to Aghast is the creepy Japanese ghost-ambience of Onna-Kodomo, but the connection is more in spirit than actual sound. An amazing album of blackened dread and witchy ambience that is obviously highly recommended! Comes in a digipack featuring metallic silver print.

The second entry in the new Crucial Blast Video line is a limited-edition VHS release of the gnarly 2022 Small Town Monsters documentary AMERICAN WEREWOLVES. Blending raw witness testimonies, some contextual folklore and anthropological commentary from researchers, and an increasingly mind-bending visual style that brings the encounters with the subject into a surreal nightmare reality, WEREWOLVES documents the bizarre "Dogman" phenomena, where people are unexpectedly encountering monstrous, bipedal canids, often in rural regions and often in proximity to early Adena-Hopewell mound-builder sites. Focused on encounters in Ohio and Kentucky, this film bridges the narrow chasm between run-ins with "high strangeness" and the irreal state of true horror.

Each year, dozens of encounters with what are described as “upright canids� are reported throughout North America. These beings often behave in similar ways, with many reports recounting a creature that is aggressive, ghastly, and disturbing. While many theorize that the “Dogman� is some sort of unidentified species of animal, many believe that what they were confronted with was something else.

Something more.

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES aims to explore an oft-overlooked aspect of American folklore. However, where previous STM films delved into similar subject matter by presenting the details of the phenomena through a panel of experts, authors, folklorists and investigators, WEREWOLVES leaves the storytelling to the witnesses. Comprised of around a dozen witness accounts, the film takes on this bizarre topic by leaving it up to the people who have experienced it to present it to the viewer The encounters discussed range from brief run-ins on rural country lanes to horrifying, face-to-face confrontations that seem like the stuff of nightmares.

Crucial Blast Video is proud to partner with Small Town Monsters to present this limited VHS videocassette of 2022’s AMERICAN WEREWOLVES, bringing this strange amalgam of regional cryptoid docudrama a la LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, surrealistic 80’s shot-on-video horror, and UNSOLVED MYSTERIES / SIGHTINGS-esque, made-for-tv production aesthetics to eerie analogue for the first time.

Limited to an limited run of 300 copies, this edition also comes with a twenty-eight page full-color booklet that includes a brand new essay on the film "Witness To The Hyper-Feral", psychedelic stills from the film, behind-the-scenes production photos, and "Stalking The Bestial", an interview with American Werewolves director Seth Breedlove.

The original film trailer can be viewed HERE

Back in stock.

Crushing eschatological violence. 2009's In The Constellation Of The Black Widow from British industrial death/black crushers Anaal Nathrakh is as extreme as anything the band has produced so far, a ten song blast of hellish, apocalyptic violence that signaled a return to the full-on feral fury of earlier albums like The Codex Necro and When Fire Rains Down From The Sky, Mankind Will Reap As It Has Sown. It was on those early releases that the band quickly established themselves as one of the most intense newer black/death bands to have surfaced at the dawn of the 2000s. Certainly one of the most pissed off sounding bands, that's for sure. After getting blasted with the withering misanthropy of those early works, it's tough coming up with another band that exudes as much anti-human vitriol within the death metal spectrum as these guys.

Their nihilistic tone was tempered somewhat by Anaal Nathrakh's growing inclusion of power metal-style vocal heroics and soaring melody as their career continued, though. I'd always been a fan of those more melodic qualities that the band incorporated into the ultra-violent, twisted deathblast on later albums, but in many ways Constellation was a return to form, with the demonic vocal outbursts that switch on a dime between insanely harsh shrieks and guttural growls taking center stage versus David Hunt's majestic baritone, the convoluted, savage riff-arrangements, the slashing, dissonance of the guitars, the corrosive electronic noise, and those furious programmed drum machines ripping through these ten tracks like artillery fire. And corrosive electronic noise that made their debut one of my favorite black/death album ever. That barbaric industrialized death metal riffage and blackened hyperblast is colored by additional textures like ghostly voices and samples that lurk beneath the metallic onslaught, and there are frequent outbursts of psychotic guitar solos, vicious electronic glitchery and weird industrial samples that explode out of nowhere, constantly keeping these songs in a state of panicked tension. One of their more ferocious records, this sees Anaal Nathrakh chronicling our slow-motion apocalypse better than most, delivering another amazingly brutal slab of supremely epic death/black metal.

I still have copies of the Polish import Metal Mind reissue that just features the album itself along with eight bonus tracks taken from the demos, and is beautifully packaged in a glossy digipak. The more recent Dark Symphonies reissue expands upon that with jewel case packaging and a 20 page booklet loaded with new liner notes, album and recording info, pics, and complete lyrics, but even more importantly, a second disc that is packed with demo, studio, and live material, much of which has never been previously released. Very nicely done. I myself had to upgrade to this one just because of the whopping 65 minutes of additional recorded material on a second disc.

Here's my older review of the music from the Metal Mind reissue :

Another older Metal Mind reissue that I'm just now discovering, Astharoth's 1990 debut Gloomy Experiments is a lesser-known prog-thrash obscurity from this Polish outfit that I just recently discovered after reading about them on some "weird thrash" list someone had posted online. Being someone who can never get enough oddball thrash, I went looking for this album after seeing them described as an unusual Voivod-influenced outfit, and Experiments turned out to be a great discovery. This stuff is a highly confusional brand of progressive thrash metal, pretty wonky stuff actually, and additionally stands out for being one of the few European thrash outfits of the time to have a female lead guitarist (Dorota Homme), who also contributes vocally for a really unique and eclectic style.

These guys were obviously drawing heavily upon both the otherworldly, spaced out dissonance of Voivod and the pummeling Teutonic thrash of bands like Kreator and Destruction with rampaging tempos and ferocious buzzsaw riffage, but that was then filtered through a quirky, somewhat spaced-out vision that rendered this into something much more unique. The guitars have a lush, textural feel, the vocals are a youthful snarl that matches the energy of the music, with introspective lyrics, and the songs shift between that furious thrash metal, strange almost jazzy guitar explosions, wild shredding, groovier rocking moments, some obvious post-punk influences, icy dissonant chords, all wound together into a set of nine sprawling, elaborately laid out songs that are delivered with an energetic, not too polished delivery. Intricate and brainy metal with lots of surrealistic atmosphere. Can't say I've heard anything quite like this album. The experimental, ambitious aspects make this something that fans of classic prog-thrash a la Coroner, Watchtower, Voivod, Mekong Delta and the like would want to check out, but Astharoth are much more prone to slipping out of their thorny thrash into sequences of chorus-drenched progginess that leads their album into unexpected directions. While Astharoth's Gloomy Experiments aren't essential if you're into progressive / weirdo thrash metal, their stuff is certainly interesting if you're into the weirder fringes of late 80s/early 90s thrash metal. This reissue pairs the album up with an additional seven bonus tracks that were recorded after the band relocated to the US in the early 90s, much of which gets into even more Voivodian territory.

OK, so on to the second disc that comes with the Dark Symphonies reissue. This one is awesome, with loads of unique, non-album material. You get a total of fourteen tracks, remastered versions of every demo the band ever did. This stuff varies in quality both in terms of songwriting, performance, and recording quality, but it's all crucial listening if you are a fan. I love the chronological track order, tracing their music from the early, chaotic roots through to the more sophisticated prog-thrash of their album-era material. The songs that feature the combination of female and male lead vocals are really great, too: "Wisdom Of The Blind" sounds as much influenced by the punchy post-punk of Killing Joke and Ghost Dance as it is by Voivod, Watchtower and Testament. Actually, in some ways this band feels like it shares more genetic material with Anacrusis than anyone else I can think of. The non-album songs prove to be pretty intriguing, with some of this demo material going even deeper into prog-rock territory than they did on Experiments. You get the 1991 Wisdom Of The Blind demo tape ("Wisdom Of The Blind", "Misplaced Senses", "Nameless"), the 1992 Limits demo tape ("Limits", "Egos Of Myself", "Accused"), the 1994 Cycles Of The Sphere demo tape ("Cycles Of The Sphere", "Denial"), and the 1990 Self-Hatred demo tape ("Toll Of Hypocrisy", "Self-Hatred", "Gloomy Experiments", "Circles Of Confusion"). There is also a previously unreleased song, "House Of Frustration", and a live track ("Drunk Hate ") that appeared on the Metalmania '89 compilation that came out on the obscure Polish cassette label Atomica.

Long in the works and finally released as a split-label effort between Infernal Machines and depraved local imprint Volva just as the two bands were about to embark on their 2019 summer tour together, Morbid Deviations is the long-awaited split album featuring two of the Baltimore / Maryland area's most vicious and destructive black metal outfits. Released as a pro-manufactured tape with on-shell printing and packaged with a pair of 1" buttons each bearing the sigil of each band, and released in a limited edition of two hundred copies, this motherfucker seethes with all of the violent, inebriated energy that these two outfits have harnessed over the past decade.

The Athame side blows this up immediately with three sweat-and-blood stained blasts of morbid ugliness from the fringes of Appalachia. It's a fetid mixture of pulsating cellar emanations with brief moments of cavernous ambiance and abstract ritualistic rattling amid the crushing chaotic, sludge-n'-punk stained black metal of "Human Flood" and "I, Accuser", with an ode to classic 80's deathrock surfacing in the middle with Athame's barbaric rendition of Christian Death's "Figurative Theatre". There is a wretched, lurching, blasting hatefulness that grips the witch-blade and follows the continuum of their underheard but satisfyingly grimy discs With Cunning Fire and Adversarial Resolve and The Burning Times. To date, some of their best work that I've heard.

On the B-side, Baltimore's Xeukatre follow with their own uniquely putrid melange of Les Legions Noires-influenced filth and ghastly low-fidelity punk. Frenzied and rotten, their three offerings "Dirgelwch Ffydd", "Sigrdrifumal" and "Scalding Blizzard of Seraphim Tears" waft off of their side of this tape like fumes from a corpse-clotted gutter. One of the few releases to surface from the trio even after a decade of skulking around dimly-lit Baltimore-area venues , this is some of the best raw, unhinged black metal coming out of the area, and hopefully a portent of more new material to come at some point in the near goddamned future.

A full-length split album that features three exclusive tracks from each band, presented with professionally manufactured cassettes with black-on-silver shell print, in a limited edition of 200 copies. Each cassette comes sealed with a pair of ATHAME and XEUKATRE 1" badges.

Once again back in stock, on black vinyl - here's the old review from previous editions:

The early EP releases from Baroness have gone in and out of print over the years on different formats, and are once again available on vinyl through the folks at Hyperrealist, this time as a single limited-edition full length Lp that collects both the band's First and Second Eps remixed and remastered and presented in a gatefold package with all of John Baizley's awesome artwork, foil stamped lettering on the cover, and a printed inner sleeve.

Monstrously epic sounding, thunderous sludge riffs and skillful dual-guitar harmonies come together with ripping d-beat hardcore aggression. Sort of like His Hero Is Gone busting out Fucking Champs-style harmonies? Although these songs all sound pretty apocalyptic, there is a great sense of melody throughout this CD - this stuff is really quite pretty and catchy at times."Tower Falls" has got some awesome anthemic breakdowns and harmonies."Coeur" is the shortest track at just over three minutes, yet still packs in killer memorable riffs and harmonies and odd (but awesome) riffs and chord phrasings. The final track,"Rise", is a monster, starting off with atmospheric finger tapping that stretches for several minutes before turning into a bulldozing sludge dirge . Awesome.

On on Second: The second EP from Baroness delivers more of their righteous and majestic post-crust-metal that we loved so much from their First CD, with technical instrumentals, lengthy psychedelia, and moody RODAN / JUNE OF 44 post-rock interjected with awesome Maidenesque / Fucking Champs-level guitar harmonies and crushing tech / sludge / crustcore. Super powerful, and Second also does a good job of capturing the band�s live energy. Killer stuff, BARONESS just keeps getting better and better with each release. And as with their first release, this disc has three songs, clocking in at around 21 minutes. Highly recommended to fans of Isis and Pelican, Disrupt and Neurosis, psychedelic crust, punishingly heavy metallic post-rock, stretched-out tarpit sludge, odd meters and complex arrangements and triumphant metal hooks.

Prepare for a descent into death-dub delirium! Just seeing that this new Japanese band featured the duo of Chew (vocalist for legendary sludge metallers Corrupted) and Kohei Nakagawa (the guy behind the longrunning extreme noise outfit Guilty Connector) was enough to make me want to pick up this self-titled debut, but this ended up being even better than expected. These six songs are formed out of an immensely bleak brand of slow-motion, industrial-tinged heaviness, focused around spare, echoing drums that creep and shuffle through a vast, dark expanse, that almost dubby percussion moving beneath encroaching waves of crushing detuned drone and streaked with bits of trippy electrnic noise. The opener "Brainwashing" alost resembles an especially doom-laden Scorn track, or perhaps something from Necro Deathmort, all slow-mo snare hits and erchoing kick drum, draped in murk and reverb, the sound of a doom metal drummer playing solo in some isolated cave chamber. AS the album moves through each subsequent track, however (the whole album seems to be essentially a single piece of music), the sound grows more frenzied and noisy, those drums becoming lost in gales of shrieking electronics and crushing low-end diostortion, and halfway in all you can make out are the violently crashing cymbals swept up in a hurricane of noise. The second half re-emerges into a much more psychedelic space, though, as swarms of frenzied tape delay effects and garbled glitchy electronics take over, joined by even slower and mor stretched out drumming, shrieking feedback and controlled blasts of distortion, contrasting space and stillness with those bursts of abrasive sound and echoing percusive skitter to lead the rest of the album into a spaced-out, utterly desolate sprawl of ashen doom-dub, desaturated isolationist ambience and ghostly electro-acoustic creepiness, a whirring, clanking, echoing nightmare that at times resembles some doom outfit channeling Lee Perry in the shadows of the world of Eraserhead.

Back in stock.

Seattle funeral doom duo Bell Witch aren't the first band of this ilk to carry with them shades and echoes of the elegiac slowcore of classic bands like Codeine, but by god their one of the best. A two-piece made up of just drums and six-string bass guitar from members of Samothrace and Sod Hauler, Bell Witch nevertheless succeed in crafting a massive sound on their second album Four Phantoms, which has been getting lots of love from devotees of metallic misery, and for good reason - these four songs (all naturally sprawling out for anywhere from ten to twenty three minutes in length, every one an epic) sprawl out into panoramic sadness, the band expertly welding their blasts of crushing glacial heaviness and crawling, time-stopping tempos to passages of achingly beautiful melody, far prettier and more fragile than what you usually hear out of bands playing stuff this agonizingly slow.

But man, those weary, stentorian riffs that tower over the album are as spiritually pulverizing as you could hope for, slow-motion blooms of rumbling, crashing dirge surrounded by guitar leads that have a similar almost synthlike vibe as Finnish gloomdoom gods Skepticism. The songs often disappear into thick fogbanks of liturgical darkness as the drums melt away and the vocals shift from that monstrous lamentation into plaintive, chantlike tones, and on "Suffocation, A Drowning", the band is joined once again by Erik Moggridge of neofolk outfit Aerial Ruin on vocals, lending his pensive voice to one of the album's more solemn, subdued moments that slowly builds into a titanic key change that gives birth to an awesome gloompop hook buried beneath the speaker-rattling low end and soporific pace. The sound is so harmonically full, I had completely forgotten that there were no fuckin' guitars on this album until well after the album was over. Immense and beautiful in its bleak, ashen majesty, and with more complex songcraft than their previous work, Phantoms is easily one of the best doom albums that's come out so far this year, those melodious, sometimes harmonized vocals giving this a warmth and humanity not often seen in funeral doom, without sacrificing that oppressive, deathly atmosphere and utterly forlorn feeling of existential despair that marks the best funeral doom, a quality that puts this album in league with other masters of the form like Pallbearer and Asunder. Comes in digipack packaging featuring superb impressionistic artwork from Paolo Girardi.

     The early throes of one of the best doom metal bands around right now. Right on the hells of their terrific new album Four Phantoms comes this vinyl reissue of the Seattle band's 2011 demo, on black vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, featuring a slightly revised layout and a more durable jacket than the previous version that came out from the German label Psychic Assault. Featuring four tracks that sprawl out for more than a half-hour of atmospheric, achingly beautiful heaviness, the band's demo has some material that would end up getting reworked for their first album Longing ("Beneath The Mask" and "I Wait"). But then there's also the two tracks that only appeared here, "Mayknow" and ""The Moment", which makes this pretty desirable for those of us infatuated with the duo's brand of crushing, melancholic doom.

     Even as far back as this demo, these guys were utilizing their spare palette of drums, bass guitar and vocals to utterly massive effect; on the instrumental "Mask", the mournful, low-end notes slowly drift around the samples from Corman's Masque Of The Red Death, opening the demo with its dreary, almost Codeine-like slowcore that leads straight into the thunderous "I Wait". These early versions are just a little more stripped down than the album versions, slightly grittier and more molten in their wall-rattling delivery, but just as suffocating heavy. The exclusive b-side songs, on the other hand, are particularly torturous. "Mayknow" is a crawling, abject dirge with some of the most terrifying vocals I've heard from Bell Witch, but will also spit out some wonderfully moody, almost bluesy guitar leads over that skull-flattening doom, and the vocals rising in a sorrowful threnody, almost choral-like as they echo across the elegiac melody that takes over the last half of the song; when they slip from that into the short instrumental closer "The Moment", it's like a clearing of thunderheads, the delicate, almost folky bass melody drifting over the ruined and blasted terrain.

     Issued in a limited run of six hundred copies.

Things get really miserable on album number two from Dutch experimental black metaller Beyond Light, another one-man band delivering the sort of intoxicatingly mournful gloom-bliss that Japanese label Maa has been cornering the market on. Sole member Belfalas offers his own odd take on the "depressive" black metal sound, mostly made up of writhing minimalist riffs and droning blackness woven around some great, uber-gloomy melodies and the occasional ripping black n' roll hook. Belfalas whips out lots of soaring hard rock solos over his rumbling old-school black metal attack, but also leads the songs into sometimes unexpected territory, scattering passages of sorrowful classical piano amid the heavier metallic songs, or slipping from the furious, slightly off-kilter black metal of "Painted Memories" into a strange freeform soundscape of wheezing harmonica and distant rumbling sounds of warfare. The songwriting is actually pretty weird, with lots of awkward, angular riffs and odd tempo changes that throw this stuff off kilter by a few degrees, but it's also quite beautiful at times, too, especially when those piano instrumentals come in, gorgeously maudlin passages of heartbroken melody and weeping string sections, or the lush, dreamy darkwave that emerges across the beginning of "Her Broken Face", resembling some classic 80's era gothic rock draped in acoustic guitars and that ghostly piano, distant wailing vocals drifting over washes of chorus-drenched guitar, leading into the sudden shift into regal black metal that kicks in about half way in, which itself makes way eventually for a monstrous blackened groove towards the end that would make Khold proud.

The album also features some terrific flights of Floydian spaciness that ascend from the remnants of Beyond Light's buzzsaw black n' roll, blurts of blighted Sabbathian doom-groove, passages of lovely dusty folkiness overlaid with harmonica that recalls Neil Young's early stuff, and smatterings of an almost Ved Buens Ende-esque dissonance that all contribute to a creative take on the "DSBM" aesthetic. And the vocals are mostly delivered as a hushed, menacing whisper buried beneath layers of distortion and grit...as with a lot of the bands in this vein that I dig, there's a bit of a Katatonia vibe going on with the more subdued gloom-rock parts; there's one song in particular on this album, "Her Cold Hands", which is one of the catchiest black metal songs I've heard in ages, and it pairs up the band's apparent love of vintage goth rock tones and ragged black metal riffery better than anything else on this disc, producing a particularly riveting anthem to personal desolation. It takes a few songs for Paintings In The Hall to really get it's footing, but once it does, it delivers a distinctive sound that's equal parts contempo black metal, weather-beaten folk and arty gothic gloom.

Back in stock.
    

The latest foray into horrific soundscapes from composer Joseph Bishara, this new score follows his third time constructing the frightening sonic backdrop to the popular Insidious series, which has updated the "family under assault by demonic forces" storyline first seen in Poltergeist to a modern, more unsettling setting. A former member of the early 90s industrial metal outfit Drown, Joseph Bishara has made a name for himself in recent years as the go-to guy for some of the better horror films currently coming out of Hollywood, drawing from the atonal modern classical music of composers like Ligeti, Crumb and Penderecki and combining that influence with contemporary electronic and experimental textures to create some of the creepiest film music being made right now. I was already a fan of Bishara's previous scores for the Insidious films, The Conjuring and Dark Skies, but the direction he would take for this new project was particularly enticing. For his score to the third installment in the Insidious series of films, Bishara teamed up with legendary metal drummer Dave Lombardo (Slayer, Fantomas) and pianist/composer Saar Hendelman to create these jet-black soundscapes, which is featured on this album as twenty-two tracks that plunge into a nightmarish sonic realm of low, rumbling percussive sound and distant ostinato strings giving way to violent, shocking blasts of orchestral dissonance, quieter sections where those muted strings drift hazily over minimal piano, or dissipate into abyssal dronescapes; violins are manipulated and molested, producing sickening glissando notes that slither and writhe through cloudy masses of low-end electronics and reverberating metallic noise; ghostly atonal melodies slip in and out of view, drifting out of the void to reveal themselves in brief glimpses before being swallowed up again in the blackness; murky electronic rhythms bubble in the depths of the mix, looping patterns that seethe on the periphery; and there are sequences of stygian ambience here that rival anything you'll find on labels like Malignant or Cyclic Law.

     Like most of my favorite scores, the sudden blasts of volume and intensity make for a terrifying listen even when separated from the film's demonic imagery, which reaches a feverish intensity whenever Lombardo's abstract drumming enters the fray, often appearing in controlled bursts of rumbling percussive sound that punctuate the louder, shocking eruptions of those fearsome strings, or producing slow, sinister swells of cymbal washing over quick, improvisational flurries of drumming; it's an exercise in skillful tension building, even the more emotionally poignant moments of Bishara's score seem to have a lingering sense of dread, like the haunting, lyrical "Questions Left Behind" and the gorgeously moody "Friendly Face"; utilizes sleek modern composition and experimental techniques, there's a definite post-industrial tinge to this music. One of the better modern horror scores, in the same terrifying league as Roque Banos's fantastic Evil Dead score. Comes in gatefold packaging.

Back in stock.

Now available on limited-edition vinyl, includes a download code.

The latest foray into horrific soundscapes from composer Joseph Bishara, this new score follows his third time constructing the frightening sonic backdrop to the popular Insidious series, which has updated the "family under assault by demonic forces" storyline first seen in Poltergeist to a modern, more unsettling setting. A former member of the early 90s industrial metal outfit Drown, Joseph Bishara has made a name for himself in recent years as the go-to guy for some of the better horror films currently coming out of Hollywood, drawing from the atonal modern classical music of composers like Ligeti, Crumb and Penderecki and combining that influence with contemporary electronic and experimental textures to create some of the creepiest film music being made right now. I was already a fan of Bishara's previous scores for the Insidious films, The Conjuring and Dark Skies, but the direction he would take for this new project was particularly enticing. For his score to the third installment in the Insidious series of films, Bishara teamed up with legendary metal drummer Dave Lombardo (Slayer, Fant�mas) and pianist/composer Saar Hendelman to create these jet-black soundscapes, which is featured on this album as twenty-two tracks that plunge into a nightmarish sonic realm of low, rumbling percussive sound and distant ostinato strings giving way to violent, shocking blasts of orchestral dissonance, quieter sections where those muted strings drift hazily over minimal piano, or dissipate into abyssal dronescapes; violins are manipulated and molested, producing sickening glissando notes that slither and writhe through cloudy masses of low-end electronics and reverberating metallic noise; ghostly atonal melodies slip in and out of view, drifting out of the void to reveal themselves in brief glimpses before being swallowed up again in the blackness; murky electronic rhythms bubble in the depths of the mix, looping patterns that seethe on the periphery; and there are sequences of stygian ambience here that rival anything you'll find on labels like Malignant or Cyclic Law.

Like most of my favorite scores, the sudden blasts of volume and intensity make for a terrifying listen even when separated from the film's demonic imagery, which reaches a feverish intensity whenever Lombardo's abstract drumming enters the fray, often appearing in controlled bursts of rumbling percussive sound that punctuate the louder, shocking eruptions of those fearsome strings, or producing slow, sinister swells of cymbal washing over quick, improvisational flurries of drumming; it's an exercise in skillful tension building, even the more emotionally poignant moments of Bishara's score seem to have a lingering sense of dread, like the haunting, lyrical "Questions Left Behind" and the gorgeously moody "Friendly Face"; utilizes sleek modern composition and experimental techniques, there's a definite post-industrial tinge to this music. One of the better modern horror scores, in the same terrifying league as Roque Ba�os's fantastic Evil Dead score.

Back in stock. Definitely not in a rush to get their albums out, Headless Eyes is only the second album to come from the New York doom metal outfit Blood Farmers, who have been slogging around since around 1989. The last time we heard these guys, it was their cult 1995 album that came out on the legendary Hellhound Records, the label that was home to some of the best underground doom of the late 80s/early 90s including Saint Vitus, Count Raven and a host of Maryland outfits like The Obsessed, Internal Void, Unorthodox, and Revelation. Blood Farmers stuck out amongst this esteemed company with a dirtier, darker vibe, heavily steeped in the imagery and aesthetics of classic horror and exploitation cinema, which makes since seeing how band leader Dave Szulkin is one of the guys behind Grindhouse Releasing (Cannibal Holocaust, The Beyond, Gone with the Pope). And thanks to their grittier, heavier sound, their music has aged a bit better than many of their peers, devoid of the grungy qualities that some of those early 90s doom metal bands shared. Now featuring former Toxik drummer Tad Leger on the skins, Blood Farmers unleash one hell of a crushing psychdoom onslaught here on Headless Eyes (the title taken from Kent Bateman's 1971 psycho-sexual sleazefest), obviously beholden to the seminal slow-mo metal of Black Sabbath and the later dark heaviness of bands like Saint Vitus and Trouble, but they bury their bilious boogie beneath a thick layer of murk and bone-rattling sludge and grindhouse sleaze. Guitarist Szulkin unleashes a gnarly tone with his menacing, miserable riffs, and singer/bassist Eli Brown flattens everything beneath the lumbering grooves that he carves out alongside Leger's sauropod tempos.

The songs frequently drift into a hazy psychedelia, shifting from the sludgy, sinister doom into languid acid guitar and watery, FX-addled singing that wind through the more subdued moments of songs like the title track, and the band also effectively incorporates fragments of film dialogue and other samples from 60's and 70's era horror films, layering these elements to dramatic effect during some of those trippy passages to lead up to when the band crashes back in with their massive heaviness. They also kick things into faster, more furious form with brief eruptions of garagy, wah-drenched mayhem, and unfurl some killer harmonized leads like that which soars over the spacey darkness of "The Creeper", an entirely instrumental song of eerie psychedelia. Then there's the nocturnal lysergic rush of "Night Of The Sorcerers", a ten minute epic that kicks off with some almost raga-like guitar before shifting into a sinister melody with sweeping synthesizer accompaniment, like some trippy take on 80's style horror soundtrack music filtered through a wicked space rock filter and gobs of monstrous glacial heaviness, dragging their sky-streaking instrumental jam into a punishing groovy. And it ends with a stunning cover of "The Road Leads To Nowhere" from legendary cinematic beast David Hess, which most probably recognize from the score to Wes Craven's notorious early shocker The Last House On The Left; at first it sounds as if the band is going to do a straight acoustic version of the song, but when they all crash in, transforming it into a haunting doom metal epic, it's just fuckin' KILLER. These guys had a lot in common with what was going on down in Maryland during the early 90s, which makes it perfectly natural that Hellhound would have worked with Blood Farmers on their first album. But that early stuff and this new album all deliver a grittier, grislier (not to mention flat out heavier) take on that sound that has aged much better than a lot of traditional doom from that era - listening to the sheer crushing weight of these songs, and it's easy to see why Szulkin was recently tapped to play on the new album from Japanese doomlords Church Of Misery.

Back in stock.

     

Here's another amazing late-oughts reissue that just came in, a new deluxe Ten Year Anniversary reissue of Boris's Pink, quite possibly the band's finest hour, resurrected via this crushing double-disc version and an even more monstrous triple-LP boxset, both filled to the gills with additional material. Originally released on Southern Lord here in the U.S., Pink further perfected the ultra blown-out psychedelia that had taken over Boris's sound throughout the decade, blending massive pop hooks and soaring melodies and heartfelt singing with their trademark use of downtuned guitar-crush and amplifier-torching noise. This was where people really started to lose their shit over this band, and their tour for the album here in the States was one of the most intense things I'd seen in quite some time. I probably pull Pink off the shelf more than any other album of theirs, and this reissue is a glorious re-examination of the band's work, pairing the original album with an entire extra disc of studio material titled Pink Sessions "Forbidden Songs", nine additional songs that were recorded during the same period and which compliment the album material nicely, serving up equal doses of their pulverizing slo-mo sludge, distorted psych blast and hazy, heat-warped pop. If you're a fan of heavy psychedelia and haven't heard this album yet, don't waste another second. Here's what I was ranting about back when we originally got the album in stock:

      The stateside release of 2005's Pink, courtesy of Southern Lord. It's a goddamn fantastic new studio blast from the band, starting off with a bleary haze of gorgeous crumbling shoegazer dirge that almost had us fooled into thinking that Boris was going to start copping Jesu/My Bloody Valentine-esque moves...but then they explode into that total destructo fuzzbomb rock that has been the focus of most of their recent albums. Eleven tracks of amped-up stoner/acid rock, saturated in tons of fuzz and reminding us of Guitar Wolf a bit, but totally crushing, every riff is godlike, and the band has incorporated melodies in a whole new way. Ultra rocking, but Boris also inject some of the other sound forms that they have worked with in the past, moving from crushing mega-drones, to blasts of ferociously noisy punk rock, to grim psych shades, and there is this ridiculously catchy, dare-we-say downright poppy melodicism that shows up throughout Pink that easily makes this the most accessible Boris album yet, while always remaining a fuzz-drowned acid/rock/sludge juggernaut. We've been jamming this album NON-STOP here at C-Blast, and we think that this might just be the ultimate Boris album, a masterpiece of catchy, epic, psychedelic heavy rock.

      As with the original Southern Lord version, the packaging for both versions of this reissue is exquisite. It's also almost completely different from the previous releases, as well. The double CD version comes in a clear jewel case that has the titles and the track list printed directly onto the plastic of the case itself, quite an interesting design effect; the booklet itself is a multi-part foldout that includes additional inserts, including perforated sheets designed in the style of old-school blotter acid. The LP boxset, on the other hand, houses the three records inside of a die-cut heavyweight folio, along with the assorted insert materials and a download card; fans should note that the vinyl edition actually features the original track lengths for the songs, some of which were edited for the CD versions, ultimately making this a distinctly different release from the CD.

      Gorgeous new vinyl edition of Botch's last live performance, previously released as part of the band's 061502 DVD and CD set. Re-mastered for vinyl, these two LPs come in printed inner-sleeves, housed inside of a heavyweight case-wrapped gatefold jacket, and issued in a limited edition of two thousand copies. This still stands as one of the most ferocious live performances I've seen documented on video, and that energy bleeds through every second of the recorded audio from this concert. Here's the old review of the live material from the CD release:

      For all of us that couldn't cough up the plane tickets to Seattle, Hydra Head has finally delivered this document of that last show from 2002. A mighty math-metal destruction machine, Botch beamed massively heavy yet super melodic and intricate jams, every one of their songs a devastatingly epic assault of chugging, confounding riffage, weird effects, earth shaking bass, complex angular rhythms n' dizzying time signatures, and monstrous roaring vocals. One of the most important and influential bands of the 90's underground heavy music scene, Botch sent hardcore spiraling off into a whole 'nother direction. This captures their final performance on June 15th, 2002 at the Showbox in Seattle, Washington. The footage is amazing, capturing the incredible energy of the band and an entirely appreciative crowd that flip out throughout the entire length of the show...their explosive, emotional set runs through pretty much all of their crucial stuff: "St. Mathew Returns To The Womb", "C. Thomas Howell As The "Soul Man"", "John Woo", "Japam", "Oma", "Frequency Ass Bandit", "Thank God For The Worker Bees", "Framce", "Third Part In A Tragedy", the cover of "Rock Lobster", "Transitions From Persona To Object", "To Our Friends In The Great White North", "Hutton's Great Heat Engine", and "Man The Ramparts". Obviously, this is something that any Botch fans aren't going to want to miss, but this should also be mandatory viewing for anybody that wants to bear witness to one of the most progressive, influential hardcore bands ever, who pretty much changed the shape of "math-metal" as we know it.

The latest 2017 reissue of this massive scum-punk collection.

Originally released on the French label Polly Maggoo back in 2007 as a double Cd (now long sold out), this formally-untitled collection of early sonic scum-assaults from these Swedish fiends is available once again, this time via the Armageddon Label who also brought us the most current edition of the 'bombs classic Obey, presented as a double Lp set limited to five hundred copies. An essential collection for anyone into the murderous punk-sludge that this outfit has been slinging for the past two decades; here's my old write-up of the original Cd release:

At long last, the collection of out of print Brainbombs singles and EPs that I've been jonesing for ever since I first heard their scumfuck masterpeice Obey! Actually, this is the Singles Collection II CD that was just released by the French label Polly Magoo, the followup to the first Brainbombs singles CD that is currently out of print. This is an equally essential anthology CD for any fans of these notorious Swedish noise punkers, gathering five different singles from 1998 through 2007 along with four never-before-released live jams from 1993. If you haven't already joined the cult, you gotta check them out if you're even remotely into the current skuzz-punk sounds of Clockcleaner, Violent Students, Homostupids, Burmese, and that ilk. Seriously. Aside from maybe Flipper, Brainbombs are the primo figureheads for violent, antisocial dirge. Brainbombs formed in 1987 in Hudiksvall, Sweden and spent the next two decades spreading their terminally reprobate, heavy-as-hell sludge punk, each of their songs usually consisting of just one monstrous riff that the band plays over and over, hammering it into the ground while their singer spews all manner of psychopathic, sexually transgressive ranting over the band's radioactive Stooges trudge in a deadpan sing-speak that sounds pretty funny at first, until you actually make out what he's saying and realize that this is pretty fucking deranged. And the music is so heavy, the riffs slow and sludgy and just evil sounding, with sinister trumpet blowing bleating over top, sending vile brass notes drifting over their droning, hypnotic noise rock, everything recorded raw and low fi and totally in the red, every instrument glazed in distortion, the drumming locking into a propulsive motorik beat. Utterly crushing genius, and one of the most crucial noise rock bands on the planet. This anthology focuses on the Brainbomb's later years, and includes the Macht (Gun couRt singles SEries) 7" from 1998, the Stigma Of The Ripper / Street Cleaner 7" on Tumult from 2003, The Grinder / Mommy Said 7" on Ken Rock from 2004, the I Need Speed 7" on Big Brothel from 2006, the Stinking Memory / Insects 7" on Anthem, and the live recordings of "Stacy", "Tired And Bloody", "Danny Was A Streetwhore", and "Urge To Kill" that were recorded in Oslo, Norway in 1993, all perfectly gnarly and noisy and raging.

Comes on black vinyl, and includes a double sided insert that includes the brief liner notes written by The Lamp's Monty Buckles that also appeared in the Cd version. Highly recommended.

Back in print on vinyl via Armageddon Shop with a new 2017 edition, with a slightly revised sleeve design and accompanied by a digital download code. Here's my old review from way back:

Obey was the first Brainbombs album I had ever heard, my introduction to their bad-news garage thuggery...the longstanding obsession that I've had with this band all started here. Obey was previously released through the label Releasing Eskimo but went out of print several years ago, and has now been reissued by the good folks over at Armageddon with slightly different packaging. Every one of Brainbombs albums is a brutal, murderous slab of misanthropic hatred and depravity, but Obey seems to top 'em all as the clearer production here allows you to hear all of the over the top, seriously disturbing rants that tumble out of the singers mouth.

The disc opens with a few moments of snappy cheesebag game show muzak, then mashes you across the grill with "Kill Them All" as the band enters among wailing feedback and a noxious plodding sludge-punk riff as the singer drunkenly states "if you've got the power, then use it an kill them all...", lurching into their trademark brand of brain-damaged noisy garage scumrock. It's simple but lethal, sludgy out-of-tune riffs repeating over and over, that banged up trumpet blaring some warped jazz over it, pummeling neanderthal drumming, every song a staggering hypnotic crawl through hideous, psychotic depictions of rape and murder and dismemberment...the "lyrics" are delivered in a heavy Swedish accent, more spoken than sung, a crazed murderous scumfuck outlining his crimes and fantasies through songs like "Die You Fuck", "Lipstick On My Dick", "Anal Desire", "Fuckmeat", extreme fucked-up litanies of misogynistic and misanthropic violence. The sludgy riffage of the Melvins dragged through the skuzzy stomp of the Stooges Funhouse and set to repeat, the music becoming more and more horrifying and hypnotic as the band hammers the riff into the ground and the singer becomes more unhinged...intense stuff.

The whole vibe here is similar to the transgressive meltdowns of Whitehouse, though to my ears Brainbombs are far more creepy and disturbing. This new reissue has pretty much the same artwork and layout, except now the artwork is all black-on-black instead of the black and white artwork of the original.

The latest repress of this classic mutoid hardcore platter, issued in a new 2017 green vinyl edition limited to one thousand and nineteen copies.

I haven't followed much of what the Butthole Surfers have done over the past two decades; wasn't into the goofy alt-rock direction that the band went in after moving to the majors in the early 90's, and their acrimonious, high-profile split with Touch And Go was one of the uglier moments in indie rock's recent history. Their early records are pretty crucial, though, and still hold up as some of the most zonked hardcore punk to ever come out of the American underground. Their debut EP has been out of print on vinyl for some time, and (surprisingly) has just been repressed by Alternative Tentacles - for fans of early hardcore, this is a crucial piece of U.S. HC history, but this 1983 slab from the Butthole Surfers should be heard by anyone into seriously freaked-out heavy underground rock.

The music on this 12" is, for the most part, much more hallucinatory than the Surfers you've seen on MTV videos, seven songs of crazed, LSD-snarfing punk like the opening track "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave", mashing caustic, hyperfast hardcore thrash with bizarre lyrical rantings, histrionic vocals, blasting drums...the stoned psychedelic trudge of "The Revenge Of Anus Presley" through wrecked acid-guitar, weird sound effects and simplistic pounding dirge..."Bar-B-Q Pope"'s squawking, twangy punk...it's a whacked out mashup of early hardcore, psychedelic rock and experimental music that was incomparable to anything else happening in the American underground at that time, and this EP still blazes with it's unpredictable music, ferocious energy and lunatic visions. Highly recommended, especially for you folks into the weirder side of hardcore punk - few HC bands have ever matched the weirdness of the early Butthole Surfers records.

      Finally back in print on vinyl, just in time for the brand-new deluxe Blu-ray/DVD reissue that's coming out through Arrow Video.

      Mostly known for reissues of deep-cut jazz/psych obscurities, British label Trunk Records had put out a couple of horror-related albums that I'd been wanting to get in stock for years, but which had gone out of print. One was the Dawn Of The Dead Unreleased Soundtrack Music compilation that features the obscure Music De Wolfe library pieces from Romero's apocalyptic zombie epic, and this, the sublimely sinister and psychedelic long-lost John Cameron soundtrack to cult classic British occult biker film Psychomania. In the hazy post-Hammer landscape of 1970's-era British horror cinema, Psychomania has always stuck out with its deranged tale of a hell-raising, devil-worshipping biker gang calling themselves "The Living Dead", and their ill-fated bid for immortality via toad-fueled necromancy and crazed supermarket carnage. It's a hoot, with numerous memorable scenes of nutty biker action, half-baked occultism, and some fantastic dialogue; no wonder it's been heavily referenced by fans of British black magic schlock like Electric Wizard and Satans Satyrs.

      Despite the film's cult following in horror/occult cinema circles, Cameron's Psychomania score was apparently never released in its entirity, with the only official release of music from the film being the two-song Witch Hunt / Living Dead 7" that came out in 1973, featuring two key themes from the film performed by Cameron's ad hoc psych outfit Frog that was formed specifically for the score. That original 7" alone has commanded some hefty prices on the collectors market, so it was great to have the entire score finally released by Trunk around a decade ago. Now back in print, we're getting this disc on our shelves for the first time, and get to revisit this bizarre soundtrack and its terrific low-fi psychedelic sleaze.

      For Psychomania, Cameron enlisted a group of British jazz musicians (going by the aforementioned "Frog" name) to perform his macabre arrangements, performing a set of tracks that craft an uncanny, hallucinatory atmosphere that kick in like good blotter, a killer mix of fuzz-encrusted psych and avant-garde gothic creep. The wah-fueled evil psych that plays over the opening "Psychomania Front Titles" combines airy flute with some seriously skuzzy funk bass and an infectious shuffling groove, producing some cool sinister instrumental rock; from there Cameron continues to exude a druggy, delirious atmosphere that goes well with the hell-raising, devil worshipping insanity on the screen, moving from spooky gothic organ and mesmeric krautrock grooves to minimal drones and echoplex-drenched piano, dropping in some raunchy garage-rock numbers like "Motorcycle Mayhem", belting out wailing female choruses and whirling gusts of witchy weirdness, and there's even some menacing keyboard-streaked tracks of hypnotic progginess that recalls the likes of Goblin. Some of the more memorable dialogue from the film is scattered among the musical tracks, and there are some lighter moments amongst all of the macabre fuzz-guitar jams, like the eerie woodwinds and gently plucked strings that form the nocturnal balladry of "Abby's Nightmare", and the unmistakably 70's-era folk rock that shows up on "Riding Free", the only track on the album that features actual singing. Some of the tracks feature brief cues that run only a few seconds in length, but there's plenty of longer tracks as well to sink your teeth into.

     The whole score was re-mastered for this release, but as label boss Johnny Trunk discusses in his liner notes, it was a tough job due to the deterioration of the original studio reels; that produces a bit of murk in the sound quality, but that's fine by me. It's still a highly listenable release that fans of the film should be greatly pleased with. The back of the sleeve features liner notes from composer Cameron, Trunk and someone named Jogoku, with Cameron describing how he utilized a variety of experimental recording techniques to create his unearthly sounds, from prepared piano noises to processed vibraphones and Hammond organs that he ran through a bank of effects units. A real blast, still one of the kookiest horror scores of the era, highly recommended for fans of vintage psych-creep and sinister experimental weirdness.

Been getting into this Texas band's brand of frantic blackened hardcore more and more, largely through their killer cassette titles that Broken Limbs has been issuing over the past year or so. First heard 'em on that killer split with blackened noise-doom mutants Venowl, but here we're finally getting a full length from the group, a reissue of a super-limited CDR they self-released a while back. And Stagnant Perceptions is even better than the stuff I've heard up to this point, delivering eleven short, punchy tracks of blistering, despairing hardcore that seems to draw equally from the more miserable fringes of black metal, the harsher edge of 90's emo, and a big dose of filthy, stench-filled grindcrust. Don't get spooked by the "E" word, though. Where I'm hearing that is in Garry Brents's use of jangling, dissonant guitar chords and brief breaks where the band's furious blackened thrashpunk suddenly swerves into muted, almost solemn melody while singer Chris Francis shreds his larynx over top, moments that are reminiscent of harder-edged stuff like Pg.99 and Saetia. These guys whip up a killer sound here, and the recording quality is the best yet from 'em, powerful and punchy and huge, especially considering that you're hearing a duo.

There's some great, technical guitarwork in here in addition to some hauntingly tremulous melody weaved throughout the songs, alongside bursts of absolutely savage blackened grindcore (which are aided by guitar and vocal contributions from Dorian Rainwater from Noisear/Phobia), and some of the guitar parts bring an almost mathy quality to certain parts of the album. Definitely not just another Trap Them / Young And In The Way clone, Cara Neir deliver their own distinctive strain of black metal-influenced hardcore, possessed with a frantic, frayed energy and a subtle progginess (especially in the rhythm section) along with a couple of moments where the band suddenly swells into awestruck beauty and majestic melody that's reminiscent of the likes of Fall Of Efrafa and Agalloch, all of which come together to really set it apart from the hordes of other bands working within this realm. Not to mention, the songs themselves are pretty goddamn catchy. This is definitely a band that fans of stuff like Young And In The Way should be checking out. Limited to one hundred copies.

Back in print, sans the backpatch that came with the previous edition.

Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...

Bloodlust And Perversion is an older collection of the first three Carpathian Forest demos that originally came out as a bootleg CD over a decade ago; this document of the Norwegian black metal crew's earliest recordings has finally been given its first official vinyl release via Nuclear War Now!, presented in a double LP edition.

The first side of the double album features the Forest's seminal 1992 demo Bloodlust And Perversion. Opening with the cinematic death-march of "Though The Black Veil Of The Burgo Pass", the band unfurls horn-like synths across mysterious field recordings and the powerful pounding war-drums, their thoroughly evil atmosphere immediately taking shape. When the title track suddenly kicks in, it's a raw, gnarled blast of mid-tempo filth that bears a striking resemblance to old American hardcore punk, the sludgy riffs crawling over simple, powerful drumming, the vocals a putrid rasp smeared across the primitive blackened stomp. I love the gluey, sludgy tone of this early Carpathian Forest stuff, it's got a dank, dungeon-spawned sludgepunk vibe that really doesn't sound like any of the other

Norwegian black metal bands from this era. The rest of these tracks all have that sludgy, deformed grooviness, "Return Of The Freezing Winds" and "The Woods Of Wallachia " almost resembling something from Upsidedown Cross with their weird wailing feedback and sub-Sabbathian splooge. But when the band closes the tape, it's with the haunting funereal folk of "Wings Over The Mountain Of Sighisoara", their delicate acoustic strum shimmering over ghostly choral synths and strange woodland noises.

Next is Carpathian Forest's 1993 demo Journey Through the Cold Moors of Svartjern; this was a more experimental release that featured three lengthy songs in a similar slow, sludgy vein as their debut demo, but infused with an even heavier synth presce4nce and more frenzied, frantic vocals. This stuff is raw and grimy, but the added murkiness only adds to the desolate, dreamy feel of the material, keyboards drifting slowly through the background, layers of horn-like texture and filthy electronic rumble and strange dissonant kosmische melodies melting into the mix. They also blend more of those acoustic guitars and distorted riffs over the death-march drums of the title track, which gives the song a strange industrial feel, equal parts sludgy black metal dirge and horror movie soundtrack creep and Swans-esque pummel; it's still one of my favorite Carpathian Forest tracks. The rest of this promo tape includes the unusual "The Eclipse / The Raven", which features spooky whispered vocals and pipe organs over shimmering electric guitar and more of that folky strum, the melody almost like something from a Riz Ortolani score, followed by more of that eerie kosmische soundtrack-style drift on "The Last Sigh Of Nostalgia", the funereal electronics, plaintive piano keys and ominous guitars winding around the echoing snarled vocals as they slowly transform into a breathtaking graveyard lament. Listening to some of this stuff, you gotta wonder how much Popul Vuh these guys might have been listening to back when they recorded this tape.

The 1992 Studio Rehearsals are the murkiest and most low-fi of all of the recordings included in this set, but this stuff still rips with a raw hardcore-style urgency. There's a rendition of "Return Of The Freezing Winds" off of the first demo and a new version of "Carpathian Forest", as well as a cover of Bathory's "Call From The Grave", all of 'em draped in black sludge and brain-damaged guitar solos and tape hiss, a pounding mid-tempo assault of Frostian heaviness and screeching frostbitten horror. The last side only has two tracks, one untitled, the other a cover of the Venom classic "Warhead"; the former is another one of Carpathian Forest's signature sludgy dirges, more of that wicked deformed tarpit punk ugliness, while the Venom cover is a somewhat bizarre take on the thrash classic, all super washed out and murked and weirdly languid, the vocals a smear of reptilian hiss.

As big a fan as I am of weird, messed-up industrial metal, I'd never heard of this obscure California outfit until now. Apparently best known for being a side-project from one of the guys in the notorious grindcore outfit Meatshits, Catatonic Existence popped up briefly in the mid 90s, releasing a split CD and a seperate split 7" with the aforementioned 'Shits, and the two song I'll Kill You All! 7" from 1994, before disappearing back into the boiling black sewer from which they emerged. The band was essentially a one-man effort from Guy Mulidor, with some additional contributions from Meatshits founder Robert Deathrage on vocals, sampling and keyboards, but it's quite different from the other stuff that these guys were doing. It's just as nihilistic and misanthropic, sure, but the music is a bizarre sort of primitive, industrialized electro-metal, not quite the Godflesh worhip that you might expect (although they are cwertainly an influence on this stuff). No, this is much weirder and much more fucked-up. Pounding double-bass drum machine rhythms and machinelike programmed pummel drill through songs like "Guy Told Me To" and "The Last Temptation", tinny thrash riffs buried in the mix beneath Mulidor's monstrous guttural gorilla-grunts, while the bass guitar and synths often break into these odd funk parts, even breaking out some actual slap-bass moves in some of the weirder moments. Also, this stuff us fucking loaded with samples, with long film samples from early 90s movies like Judgement Night and Needful Things as well as fragments of news reports and various other movies are strewn throughout the songs, and there are big chunks of this stuff when the metallic elements drop out and it turns into a demented kind of EBM, some fucked-up, meth-addled take on Front 242. It's not for all tastes, I can tell you that. The awkward song structures, the bizarre funk bass, the squelchy Wax Trax synths and weird bossa nova percussion breaks, the overload of samples and the willfully anti-human attitude, all turns this into a kind of outsider mecha-metal that manages to transcend being just another Godflesh clone. It's weirdly infectious, especially if you've got a taste for weirdo electro-sludge like Black Mayonnaise and stuff in that general vein.

"

Limited 2008 two disc (CD + NTSC/Region 0 DVD) release of the Metal band's third album including a bonus DVD (entitled Our God Has Landed) that contains a live show from 1992 plus eight promo video clips. Originally released in 1995, Carnival Bizarre proved to be arguably the defining document for the band. The album bridges the gap between the gritty Doom of the band's earliest recordings with the vibrant catchiness and quirkiness which became the band's trademark. Cathedral were formed by ex-Napalm Death vocalist Lee Dorrian and ex-Acid Reign guitarist Garry Jennings. Features a guest appearance by Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi on 'Utopian Blaster'. The package comes housed in a double CD jewel case and offers an essential slice of Metal history in one complete audiovisual set. 23 tracks.

" - label description

     Both Christian Death's Ashes and Catastrophe Ballet were recently released on limited-edition cassette tape, both already sold out from the source.

     While Christian Death did put out some highly listenable material after the departure of founding member Rozz Williams (at least early on), there's really only three Christian Death albums that you really, really need in your collection: the pioneering and provocative 1982 debut Only Theatre Of Pain, and the two albums with both Williams and Valor Kand that followed, Catastrophe Ballet and Ashes. All of these are key works in the death rock canon, and their combined influence has reached well into the realms of extreme metal, industrial music and beyond; any headbanger who turns their nose up at Christian Death's early works simply based on the band's campy look should consider sitting down and listening to these albums side by side with Celtic Frost's 80s output to see just how far the band's black tendrils extended. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in the early Christian Death material, though, what with this whole death rock revival thing that's been going on for the past few years, and it looks like a whole new generation of listeners has been turning on to the weird, morbid genius of Rozz Williams. Not a moment too soon, I say. We've had the reissue of Only Theatre Of Pain available here for awhile, but up till now never stocked the following two albums, both of which were reissued by Season Of Mist in 2009; featuring booklet materials from the original first edition LP releases on L'Invitation Au Suicide and newly re-mastered, both come with the highest recommendation for anyone obsessed with true death rock and the most macabre fringes of post-punk.

     Originally released in 1985 on French label L'Invitation Au Suicide, Ashes was the final album from the Rozz Williams-fronted lineup of Christian Death, and an end to an era. While I won't completely write off the post-Williams output from Christian Death (the subsequent 1986 album Atrocities is pretty goddamn good), this was the last chapter in what had been a genre-defining run of albums, now iconic entries in the American death rock canon. On their third album, Christian Death were getting even more progressive, evolving into something totally unique within the realm of American post-punk. Williams' vocals are more measured, less overwrought than before, and there's a heavier feel to this material; maybe more so here than with any of the other Christian Death records, you can really pick out the elements of their sound that so enamored Tom Warrior - one listen to the driving, almost metal-tinged power that emanates off of the opening title track, and you can hear echoes of what would later emerge on Celtic Frost's Into The Pandemonium, the end of the song showcasing a ferocity rarely heard in this era of the band. From there, the eerie instrumental "Ashes Part 2" leads into more of Rozz's penchant for experimental soundscapery, and all throughout the album he laces the tracks with peripheral traces of Gregorian chant and ghostly mechanical sounds, squealing violins and nightmarish sound collage, even dreamlike forays into Weimar cabaret on "Lament (Over The Shadows)". The actual songs are some of their best, too. "When I Was Bed" is classic death rock, catchy and propulsive and draped in elegant shadow, and "Face" is the band at their churning best, fusing a smoldering psychedelic quality to the rolling tribal drums and handclaps and cob-webbed post-punk guitars, another all time favorite. Other highlights on the album include the slow brooding atmosphere that wraps around "The Luxury Of Tears", the metallic mausoleum creep of "Before The Rain" that transforms into something surprisingly triumphant, and the bad-dream dread of closer "Of The Wound", the sound of a screaming infant laid over a nightmarish string section and discordant piano, taking the album out into a final sprawl of surrealistic weirdness. A genuine classic of morbid post-punk.

      Both Christian Death's Ashes and Catastrophe Ballet were recently reissued on limited-edition cassette tape, both already sold out from the source.

      While Christian Death did put out some highly listenable material after the departure of founding member Rozz Williams (at least early on), there's really only three Christian Death albums that you really, really need in your collection: the pioneering and provocative 1982 debut Only Theatre Of Pain, and the two albums with both Williams and Valor Kand that followed, Catastrophe Ballet and Ashes. All of these are key works in the death rock canon, and their combined influence has reached well into the realms of extreme metal, industrial music and beyond; any headbanger who turns their nose up at Christian Death's early works simply based on the band's campy look should consider sitting down and listening to these albums side by side with Celtic Frost's 80s output to see just how far the band's black tendrils extended. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in the early Christian Death material, though, what with this whole death rock revival thing that's been going on for the past few years, and it looks like a whole new generation of listeners has been turning on to the weird, morbid genius of Rozz Williams. Not a moment too soon, I say. We've had the reissue of Only Theatre Of Pain available here for awhile, but up till now never stocked the following two albums, both of which were reissued by Season Of Mist in 2009; featuring booklet materials from the original first edition LP releases on L'Invitation Au Suicide and newly re-mastered, both come with the highest recommendation for anyone obsessed with true death rock and the most macabre fringes of post-punk.

      Originally released by the French label L'Invitation Au Suicide in 1984, Catastrophe Ballet is an all-time deathrock classic, part of the essential Christian Death canon. It was also the first release to feature new members Valor Kand and Gitane Demone, both of the LA post-punk outfit Pompeii 99; for this new album, Williams and his new lineup shifted away from the creepy, transgressive punk of their debut, into a more expansive and psychedelic sound that was slightly more accessible, but no less twisted. Dedicated to the memory of Andr? Breton and featuring excerpts from Jean Lorrain's classic text of nightmarish decadence, Nightmares Of An Ether Drinker, Ballet saw Williams getting deeper into his obsession with French surrealism and Dadaism, though this did nothing to improve his terminally dour mood. From it's opening salvo of sinister, kitschy haunted house organs that pave the way for the heavy bass-driven post-punk of "Beneath His Widow" (a bonus track that appears here for the first time), to the surrealistic washes of experimental texture and droning instrumentation of "Sleepwalk", the driving, disaffected menace and gloomy elegance of "The Drowning" and "Evening Falls", the pounding tribal rhythms and twitchy, stop-start momentum of "Cervix Couch" smeared in trippy Hammond organ textures, and the ritualistic dreamlike haze of "The Glass House", the band's sound was clearly becoming more sophisticated and experimental. That fey, androgynous howl that Williams belted out on the first record is replaced by a richer, more resonant croon that's frequently been compared to David Bowie, and he was often joined by Gitane Demone's soulful, sometimes bluesy wail, which added a new wrinkle to Christian Death's sound. Many of the songs on Ballet are sublimely catchy, but they also ventured further afield into the kind of creepy experimental soundscape work that Williams would explore with his solo projects later in the decade, tracks like "The Fleeing Somnambulist" blending together looping vocals, vast sprawls of warbling drone and distant industrial rumble, swells of psychedelic electronic noise and random percussion, dreamlike terrain strafed with the dark carnival sounds of what sounds like a steam-powered calliope. This results in one of the more adventurous dark post-punk albums from the era, combining themes of violence and death and eroticism with haunting hooks and an unsettling, though often strikingly beautiful vibe as no one else could. Crucial.

PRE-ORDER. WILL SHIP ON OR AROUND 9/18/23.

Deluxe double vinyl LP pressing including bonus LP of demos. Includes coffee table book and poster. Christian Death's 1982 debut album Only Theatre of Pain was highly influential in the development of the style of music known as deathrock, as well as on the American gothic scene. During this time legendary LA punk rock photographer Edward Colver befriended the band and shot Christian Death at a dozen of the band's concerts in the Los Angeles area during 1981 & 1982, as well as a shoot with the band at Rozz's family home which was later used for the album back cover of Only Theatre of Pain.

Shit has gotten completely out of hand with the Goblin guys. It seems we're now looking at least four different versions of the band that are currently active, presumably due to internal dysfunction amongst the founding members. It's making it tough to keep track of what's what. On the other hand, there's a LOT of Goblin related stuff coming out, whereas ten years ago it was virtually impossible to, say, find a decent copy of Suspiria here in the US without having to sell a kidney to fund the venture. I'm planning on stocking the new Goblin Rebirth album that just came out from Relapse, as what I've heard so far has been pretty terrific. Right now, however, I'm having a Simonetti moment. He started working with the Italian industrial music label Rustblade recently, and suddenly we're getting all kinds of cool stuff from the famed Goblin keyboardist. You'll find the brand new thirtieth anniversary reissue of Simonetti's awesome Demons score elsewhere on this week's new arrivals list, one of my favorite recent horror soundtrack reissues, and here we have a less-essential (but still plenty enjoyable) limited edition picture disc from Simonetti that (once again) sees him revisiting some of Goblin's most classic themes.

Released under the name Claudio Simonetti's Goblin, The Murder Collection is a collectable art-object/collection of revamped themes from the band, which is really just a renamed version of Daemonia, Simonetti's long running heavy metal/prog rock outfit. I'm a fan of Daemonia's stuff as well, so it's a blast hearing them do new rearranged versions of nine of Goblin's best-loved tracks, adding some of that metallic edge that Daemonia has always had. They don't stray too far from the feel of the originals, but longtime Goblin fans will definitely notice a difference; Simonetti's synthesizers are given prominence, so if you're a fan of his iconic electronic textures and style, you'll get a lot of that with this record. The new version of "Phenomena" particularly sticks out, the band reworking the second half of the song into a monstrous Hammond-dosed boogie, and Zombi's "L'alba Dei Morti Viventi" gets some serious metallic chug added to the song's sinister, droning prog rock groove. The version of "Roller" that appears here is lushly arranged, and "Non Ho Sonno" is given more metallic bite than before; a rendition of "E Suono Rock" off of Goblin's classic 1978 album Il Fantastico Viaggio Del "Bagarozzo" Mark is turned into a stunning piece of jazz-laced prog metal, and the record is capped off with an especially rollicking version of "Zombi". It's all classic stuff that's hardly necessary for fans who already own the original scores, but if you're a big Simonetti / Daemonia junkie, it's an enjoyable alternate take on this music. Gorgeous to boot, though the "spooky child" artwork seems a little too contemporary for this sort of stuff. Released in a limited hand-numbered edition of four hundred ninety-nine copies on 180 gram vinyl; all of the copies that we received from the distributor do not include the obi strip that apparently came with some of these records, FYI.

     One of the few truly essential "war metal" albums (at least, for those already enamoured with this brand of bestial savagery), Conqueror's sole full-length is finally back in print on vinyl, this time as a definitive "20th Anniversary" version that includes all of the material that was included on the previous double CD version.

      Formed by former Cremation drummer James Read and Domini Inferi guitarist Ryan F?rster, Conqueror expanded upon the frenzied blackened death metal pioneered by Oath of Black Blood-era Beherit and fellow Ross Bay Cult maniacs Blasphemy, whipping their barbaric blast into even more bone-rattling extremes that could at times border on an almost noisecore-like level of sonic extremism. This was a direct precursor to the likes of Revenge (which rose from the ashes of Conqueror) and the berserker noisecore of Intolitarian, truly extreme music endowed with an uncompromising misanthropic worldview that made most black metal bands look like card-carrying members of UNICEF. Conqueror only released one album during their existence, and it's gathered here alongside the band's demo and compilation tracks, as well as their material from the split with Black Witchery, comprising the complete discography of the group; essential listening for anyone into Read's subsequent work with Revenge, and anyone obsessed with the most violent and depraved extremes of death metal.

      The first disc in the set features Conqueror's 1999 album War Cult Supremacy, their magnum opus of bestial blackened grind. This barbaric nine-song album still rattles the senses some fifteen years on, each song a relentlessly violent eruption of Forster's abrasive, acidic guitar sound and Read's maniacal whirlwind drumming, those grinding riffs splintering into seemingly random solo splatter and those weird glissando pick-slides that are a distinguishing feature of Conqueror's sound; the riffs seem carved out of a punk-like simplicity and ferocity, and Read's strangled, hysterical screams sound absolutely inhuman. That combination of hyperspeed drumming and grating concrete-mixer riffs brought an almost noisecore-level of sonic chaos to Conqueror's cyclonic death metal attack; indeed, this stuff feels as if it more closely shares DNA with the nuclear chaos of Scum-era Napalm Death, early Siege, and Repulsion than the black/death metal of its day.

      A shitload of bands would subsequently jump onto Conqueror's coattails trying to harness the bestial blast perfected on this album, but almost nobody has managed to even come close to capturing the foul, almost avant-garde noisiness that these guys belched out. Read's horrifying snarling screams can sometimes degenerate into weird electronically-processed vocal noises, and songs will suddenly collapse into blasts of over-modulated, reverb-drenched noise, or bizarre insectile buzzing will swarm across the depths of the mix. That stuff gives this a disturbing, alien feel, like the disgusting fluttering oscillator-like effects that beat their black wings beneath the churning deathblast of "Kingdom Against Kingdom", or the blasts of almost industrial pandemonium that erupt in the middle of the title track. While the riffs are certainly vicious, they are swept up in such a storm of distortion and blastbeat chaos that it all washes together into a blur of hateful sonic violence, the most punishing moments on the album arising when Read suddenly decelerates into one of his barbaric, almost tribal breakdowns amid that blur of blackened blastnoise.

      Disc two compiles everything else the band did, including the material from the 1997 Osmose compilation World Domination II, the split with Black Witchery, the 1996 demo tape Anti-Christ Superiority, and their cover of "Christ's Death" by Sarcofago. Even on the earliest material, Conqueror's sound was incredibly savage, and there's an almost industrial feel to some of the booming metallic percussion that thunders throughout these tracks. That demo from '96 in particular is something you need to hear if you're obsessed with the whole Ross Bay/bestial noise-metal aesthetic, just undiluted savagery from start to finish. In total, this collection is pretty much the last word in irradiated nuclear metal chaos, a distillation of the unending warfare that continues to enfold our planet into pure sound, and one of the few true essential entries into the "war metal" genre you're ever going to need.

There have been a gajillion different versions of the collecrted wax cylinder recordings and acetates of the Great Beast since the 1970s that originally were recorded all the way back in 1920 as The Great Beast Speaks. These editions really started popping up on underground industrial/occult labels in the 1980s cassette culture, with versions put together by Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth and Incubator, and the oft-sourced LP edition on Goetia from 1986 (titled The Hastings Archives / The World As Power) being the first real complete vinyl release of these recordings (it was soon followed by another "bootleg" LP simply titled Aleister Crowley which included liner notes from Current 93's David Tibet - I've been looking for just a facsimilie of those for years). And the terrific weirdo-culture label TPOS jumped into the fray as well, producing this cassette version of Crowley's famed spoken-word recordings in 1990 that has remained in print ever since, as far as i can tell. The specific track list and order on Poems And Invocations is exactly the same as the Goetia LP, so I suspect that these recordings were pulled from there, especially since the sound quality on Invocations is better than most of the other Crowley tapes that I've heard. I dig how TPOS made a point to delineate the ritual recordings from Crowley's poetry readings, with the former on the A-side and the latter on the back. Keeping these two different sessions slightly seperated enhances the listening experience, at least in my opinion.

I'm not concerned with the debates surrounding Crowley's delivery of the legendary Enochian Calls and whether or not his pronunciations were correct - I'm just glad that I can hear the man doing his thing. For anyone interested in early 20th century magick, Thelema, Golden Dawn, etc., the four tracks are fascinating to hear. Crowley invokes "The Call Of The First Aethyr " and "The Call Of The Second Aethyr ", each one first attempted in the original Enochian text, then followed by his reading of the English translation. Obviously the fidelity on these ritual recordings are primitive and murky at best; the century-old technology used to record this work immediately left a patina of great age and aural obfuscation on the material; I've noticed that the recordings posted online have attracted some small following of ASMR fans who respond to the crackling, dust-caked, distant feel of the recording, the air filled with scratches of time and wear on crumbling grooves. That newfound aspect of this just makes everything around these Crowley recordings even weirder, as they find their way into the internet age.

The poetry featured on side two is of greater interest to me, actually. I'm a huge fan of his pornographic, scatological verse collected in his book White Stains; there are lines in there that black metal lyricists would have killed to come up with. The poetry recording is made up of ten individual spoken pieces, and as is the case with his written verse, the quality can vary. Pieces like the heartsick paen to love "La Gitana" and the flowing dreamstate of "At Sea" can somewhat resemble the surrealist visions of Breton, though not quite reaching the same ecstatic heights; also unusual is the declaratory meter of "The Pentagram", the bawdy tribute to whoredom "One Sovereign For Woman", the weird warnings of "Fingernails", and "Excerpts From The Gnostic Mass", which drifts off from your speakers like a homily, strange and profane. Lesser works like the self-referential "The Poet", his eulogy to "The Titanic", and the celebratory cadence of "Hymn To The American People On The Anniversary Of Their Independance" are still important to hear, even if just as a historical piece. But the weirdest of all of this stuff is the song "Viva La France" at the very end, which Crowley belts out alongside piano accompaniment - it's a fittingly perverse and unexpected burst of jocularituy from the guy, who here hardly sounds like the great degernate and icon of "evil" of his era. I love it. I really get the impression from some of these readings that Crowley was a romantic at heart.

Alongside Austin Osman Spare, there's no arguing that Aleister Crowley really was the most notorious and influential occultist of the 20th century, and he lives still, his voice a spirit revived from ancient pieces of wax and aluminum.

Back in stock, found a few in the pit.

    

Just dug up a couple copies of this cassette from bizarre one-man Finnish outsider "black metal" outfit Dead Reptile Shrine, a band whose sound continues to bewitch and bewilder every time I listen to 'em. One of several Dead Reptile Shrine cassettes that were released by the now defunct Antihumanism, N.t.K. first appeared as a similarly limited CDr back in 2002, one of the band's very first releases. And it's a total brainwarp, opening with a weird shambling dirge of primitive percussive thud amid squealing feedback and distressed noise, an almost industrial-style intro that lurches beneath sinister whispered voices as "Nokturnal Thelema Krusifixion" gradually winds down into a rickety improvised dirge.

It's only with the second track "Rotting Flesh Laid On Altar" that Dead Reptile Shrine kicks in with his demented take on black metal, as the music swells up into a murky, low-fi racket of sludgy riffing, howling chantlike vocals and sneering shrieks all over that perpetually deranged drumming that perpetually falls in and out of time. It's a perfect example of the band's brain-damaged black metal, the music often degenerating into a shambling mess that still manages to possess a strange psychedelic quality, and as the album goes on, it delivers a weird kick akin to hearing some satanic outsider improv-folk outfit on ESP Records shot through with meandering distorted guitars and snarling rat-vocals.

     There's some gloriously tuneless stuff on here that's like the Shaggs (a band that they've been compared to before), slow, plodding black metal riffs collapsing into drooling mayhem, the vocals truly demented as they slip in and out of that fucked-up chanting, but those moments where it all comes together have a crushing, retarded power that I totally adore. Some songs erupt into noisy blasts of blastbeating drums and mangled blackened guitar, tornadic swarms of chaotic violence, only to give way to rambling, reverb-drenched folkiness, long stretches of mesmeric dungeon ambient or bursts of plodding, drunken hardcore punk, sometimes backed up warm, minimal synthesizer chords and laced with freeform guitar plucking, or wandering into ultra-abrasive stretches of over-modulated noise overlaid with traces of epic orchestral music ...and songs like "Power From Blasphemous Intent" twitch and blast with a hideous discordant violence that's as brain-scrambling as anything from later Havohej.

There's a twelve minute track on the b-side called "Of Silence, Sickness & War" that's also noteworthy, delivering a languid, shadow-streaked psychedelic jam that emanates a ghostly, murk-drenched atmosphere all its own. It's fucked. Raw and rambling and exquisitely messed-up. But in all this chaotic craziness, there's some amazingly catchy melodies that creep out of the seemingly random riffery and improvised din, a brilliantly brain-damaged strain of garage-grade necro-psychedelia that I can't get enough of, for fellow fans of the most demented, delirious outre black metal only...

Rightously lobe-melting 2022 full-length of psychotronic electro-gargle that came out on the longrunning No Sides imprint, whose head William Sides also appears within this newer duo-setup for Death Factory. This outfit is an institution in the Chicago avant-noise underground, hammering it out for more than thirty-five years now. With Sides beside him, DF's main noisemaker Michael Krause dives right back into the vat of dark industrial, oily electronic noise, and crazed psych-synth mayhem that the Factory has been churning out for decades now. The image of these two smartly-dressed gentlemen on the cover of Artifact Events might lead you to think this is a moer "academic" style foray into experimental electronics, but this seventy-minute maelstrom is straight chaos. Not quite as gnarled as the Invisible Agressor tape I did with Death Factory nearly a decade ago, but still tough stuff.

Gettin' some supreme creep here. Artifact starts off slow and shadowy, languid over-modulated drones rising and falling in swells over a super-minimal bass melody; this fourteen minute meditation piece "Hymn For Ruination" comes from the same kind of suppressed nightmare circuity that birthed that Invisible Aggressor I put out through C-Blast. A wall of soft, pulsating fuzz and electrical hum surrounds the vague musical gestures and barely-formed figures riding those billowy shadows, this epic death-drone gradually increasing in mass and density as it continues to unfurl. Killer. I love the far-off minor key laments that surface here and there, resembling stray bits of funereal organ trying to make their way past the omniprerxent voltage hum. Heavier chordal textures materialize, these deep, slowly roiling fragments of sorrowful music shrouded in all of that hiss and buzz and warping sinewave movements. A kind of damaged funeral-drone. The sound just throbs out of my speakers.

That placid murkscape is then shredded to fuckin' pieces by the ghastly harsh electronics of "Shellshock Mantra", insane whooping cries impossibly tangled in screeching, fluctuating feedback, bizarre synth gibberish, peals of tortured twisted metal, weird horn-like bleats over a rumbling sub-strata of distored bass churn; a total destructive anxiety attack in league with Pain Jerk or the really violent C.C.C.C. stuff, melting down into a crushing wave of psychedelic chaos. "Statues" is likewise a total skull-shred, high-pitched electronic feedback and tone abuse whipping around hard metallic drones and looped mechanical rumble. This tape just keeps flying further into total pandemonium, trippy and terrifying as these often fifteen-minute plus pieces come screaming in across the smoking ruins of the previous track, spaced-out synthesizer agonies being stacked one upon the other, that whipstrike sinewave fuckery leaving deep, bloody gashes in your flesh. So much abusive modulation of signals, reaching heights of heaviness I did not expect.

"Afterglow" returns to a semblance of that original state of pulsing grace: multiple rhythmic loops trip and stumble over each other as more feedback-generated anti-melodies take shape and writhe in the air before you. What sounds like a destroyed Moog synth starts swirling around the dundering beat-loops, evoking the scraps of some yesteryear psych-rock band being pulled like carrion strips from its crumbling skeletal frame - this is definitely one of my favorite parts of Artifact Events , this extended mantra of heavily mutated rock keyboards, like shredded ectoplasm from Hawkwind, or Gong, or maybe The 13th Floor Elevators, adhering to mesmerizing Merzbowian loops. Loops, loops, loops. Loops of acid synth, loops of found sound, loops of backwards drums carved into an ill off-kilter shuffle. Yeah, this is Death Factory at its most scouring, unleashing these lysergic effects-pedal seizures and howling drones with no regard for space or form; ruthless and blown-out psychedelic sadism. Has it all been building to this? Does the twenty-minute closer "Mount Cyanide" continue to chase this state of charred, wilting bliss? You bet it does. One final flight into volcanic electro-madness, the heaving breathing of some monstrous thing crawling up into a dementia of circuit-bent skree, cranked feedback and mangled sinewave, becoming a shadow of an air-raid siren while rapid blips and whirring machinery and looping , elliptical rhythms take shape once again, driving it all headfirst into a new blossoming colossus of sonic tribulation.

I've made a note to have this on hand te next time I go for the "heroic dose". God knows where I'll end up. Probably shrunken, dried, and curled in a corner of my own cratered skull.

Join me.

Along with the excellent psychnoise experience of the Artifacts tape, this earlier disc also features main man Michael Krause teamed with William Sides to produce some more longform lysergic-laced post-industrial darkness. On this 2017 recording, Krause continues to handle the synthesizers, percussion, and electronic elements with Sides adding on the additional synths and electronic signals to produce a five-track ful length that gets even more demented than their other collaboration.

Death Factory's patented blend of coarse electronics, sculpted noise, and grinding rhythm-based loop-scapes with classic kosmischemusic and psychedelia

A gruesome bass-squelch appears, writhing around in a clotted mess of ghostly feedback and synth blurp, an abberant blasphemy of something vaguely reminiscent of an Asiatic melody, while swarms of snarling electronics and whirring glitch dart and flit overhead; the sound of that opener "Revelation of the Fendahl" is a bizarre, semi-structured scaffold of trippy, twisted metal and bedraggled signal-waves. Despite the Dr Who reference in the title, this feels more and more schizophrenic as it unfolds, the sounds melting into one another and cereating a malformed mass of FX-fuckery. A prelude to the nearly half-hour "Knight Forces"? When that suddenly kicks in, it wipes the slate free of debris, initially laying down a faint filimient of high-tone feedback and an imperceptible mechanical thrum deep under the sdurface; an eerie minimalist noisescape that extends outwards over the epic duration of the piece. It borders on pure ambient presence, hinting at some of the most sparse early Prurient works, but posessed with Krause's signature attention to grimy detail. That spectral whine and whirr gets demolished by an abrupt blast of hideous gurgling synth and skull-scraping percussive overload, like hearing a corpse in the midst of a military blast-test that has been outfitted with numerous contacts mics - it's a frenzied and frankly somewhat nauseating sprawl of deranged effect-pedal violence and heavily amplified scrape and skree that has a real visceral effect on the listener. Definitely still in the borderlands, spying only the most loathsome aspects of electronic psych-spurt, backed by what sounds like mic'd metal or other objects being beaten into pieces. Some of the lower tones that the duo hits on this track are intense; the spaced-out effects and garbled chaos can sometimes evoke the pissed-off electronic overload of Bastard Noise, Pain Jerk, or even Actuary. Again, visceral. This is Death Factory at its most physically assaultive.

There's another "shorter" piece, "Live in Kalamozoo"; definitely sounds live, and sounds like the duo are doing some serious damage to the audience by way of waves of massive low-end synthesizer drone and grinding bass, ultimately unleashing their signature brain-scrambling devil-Moog hysterics that were probably rattling the beer cups out of everyone's hands. I can hear some people in attendance are seriously feeling it. That earthquake monster is followed by two more long-form noise attacks, "Restraint is Hard" and "Neverwhere (for Crazy Andy) " that again pull you into spare and threatening fields of electrified malfunction and malfeasance, streaking a low-end sub-strata of guttural synth with delay-soaked effects and that gnarled feedback twisted and shaped into something terrible. That contrast between large minimal sound spaces and bomb-blasts of distorted, mangled synthesizer seizure seems to be the driving MO behind the bulk of this disc. Yiou don't get as much of the wild LSD-wrecked psych-filth and faux-Moog monstrosities I usually hear with older Death Factory recorings. They are here, just held back, caged up, pulling at the chain but not being unleashed until the duo have buiilt everything up to an intended level of tension through those sprawling drone-fields and ascents onto immense death-ambient monoliths. But when they let loose with that Hawkwind-in-a-blender synthesier maelstrom that Krause has made his signature sound (and by god, he goes there, he transforms the last twenty minutes of this album into something terrifying and apocalyptic), and it feels like I've got Venusian vermin chewing my feet off as Planet X starts its approach to Earth and the skies burn black above me, it drives my endorphnes through the fuckling roof. This is something a little different. Still abrasive, but different.

Comes in a plastic DVD case.

A recent cassette edition of this classic collection of crazed ultra-violence, released on the Indonesian tape label Grind Today.

First released by Pessimiser back in 1999, West Side Horizons is a collection of everything recorded between 1994 and 1996 by the notorious Inglewood, California blastcore outfit Despise You, a band that featured members of 16, Crom, Excruciating Terror, Stapled Shut and Gasp, who never performed live during their original run and who surrounded their band in the imagery of LA Latino street gangs. There was a truly threatening vibe around Despise You's music, amplified a thousand times over by the band's simple but lethal combination of bizarro time signatures, an utterly blown out bass guitar sound, crushing downtuned death metal chug, hyperspeed hateful hardcore punk, and, in a move that appears to have been inspired by legendary LA punks X, dual male and female vocalists, with frontman Chris Elder trading off his ferocious, feral screams with Leticia Perez's bratty punk rock shout. At the time, that mix of vocal styles was unusual, especially with this sort of ultra-violent heaviness, and added a frantic energy to their music that just made everything sound like it was on the verge of collapsing in panic. With songs that would typically average around thirty seconds in length, Despise You's music offered a unique take on the extreme hardcore of the early 90s West Coast underground, veering from discordant, sludgy thrash to chaotic blastbeat violence splattered with weird, nauseating dissonant bass riffs, the blasting tempos suddenly degenerating into crushing angular sludge and massive doom-laden breakdowns, and blasts of stomping, hateful punk. These guys employed the same sort of brutal slow/fast dynamic as bands like Infest and Crossed Out, but Despise You had a feel of utter abject desperation to their music that was unique among their peers. And when they really let loose with the blast-tornado, this band was capable of unleashing a veritable wall of noise, a cyclone of inchoate downtuned speed violence that on some tracks can totally degenerate into almost pure noisecore insanity. Good luck finding anything more intense than this; one listen top Despise You's stuff and you can see where contemporary bands like Weekend Nachos and Magrudergrind are getting their inspiration from...

The first fifteen songs on West Side Horizons were all previously unreleased, and from what I can tell appear to have originally been recorded for a planned split LP with Man Is The Bastard that was later aborted. All of 'em are ultra-brutal blastcore eruptions that include a furious, breathless cover of Possessed's "Burning In Hell", which Despise You turn into a brutal hardcore assault. Listening to these unreleased tracks, you can really make out the weird bass parts and the band's penchant for angularity, something that definitely put these guys closer to the sort of barbaric off-kilter power violence that Man Is The Bastard were doing than the more straightforward hardcore-centric sound of other bands of the era. Despise You could bust out some seriously catchy hardcore blasts too, though, and pulled off jet-speed covers of crossover classics like DRI's "Couch Slouch" with aplomb. Aside from those raging unreleased tracks that open the disc, this collection also includes Despise You's PCP Scapegoat EP, the tracks off of their split 7"s with Stapled Shut, Suppression, and Crom, their nine tracks from the Left Back/Let Down double 7" compilation, and their track off of the Reality Part I compilation, and cap it all off with one last unreleased song from 1991 that sees the band slipping out of whiplash inducing blasting into crushing sludgery. Absolutely essential for anyone into the West Coast "power-violence" scene and bands like Man Is The Bastard, Crossed Out, Spazz and Capitalist Casualties.

Man, I love this band. You want to see a group of musicians pull off some wild sleight-of-hand with their sound? Dimentianon do just that with their latest album, the first in a dercade from these USBM iconoclasts. I had raved about the off-kilter, slightly prog-damaged blackened death of their Collapse The Void LP, an album that likewise took the black/death vibe and twisted and carved it into something unexpected. Well, Yuggoth does the same but in a completely different manner; I haven't seen much chatter about the album online, but this has got to be one of the wildest discs of 2021. I was originally drawn to these guys being a fan of their other bands, with one member doing time in Evoken, and a couple members manning the awesomely horrific underground doom outfit Rigor Sardonicous. After digging in to their older work, I've heard a band who has been in a state of constant violent flux with each new record, while remaining pretty commited to visions of cosmic horror and nihilism that move through the music on every record. The Lovecraftian-themed title of Dreaming Yuggoth is a giveaway for an even deeper push into nihilistic philosophy and jet-black cosmology, but tyhe lyrics offer something more intimately anguished and existential. No mere "bestial" blast with these guys, especially with this latest album.

The first time I listened to Yuggoth I thought I had them pinned down, with the beginning of the album exploding into a warblast of cyclonic black metal and deathdoom heaviosity. But with each song Dreaming Yuggoth shifts and turns on itself, a slow and deliberate move towards slower, almost gothic rock like arrangements that dominate the second half of the album. It's pretty brilliant listening, at first being flayed by the churning mass of black/death barbarism of "Undying Bliss" a rage of atavistic blastbeats and hypnotic, primitive riffing that cycles continuously. Kind of reminds me of the weirder latter day Beherit stuff, but only vaguely. But then the band emits clouds of symphonic-sounding synth into the otherwise monstrous, ascendent chorus, those keyboards filling the chaos with an unusual , majestic presence not often heard in this style of extreme metal. And an even bigger curve is thrown when the song melts down into eerie doom/death, a trudging, cadaverous procession. This growing atmopsheric and melodic feel builds as it proceeds to create an undeniably dark and anguished soundcape. "Dwelling Into Madness" unfursl into more ghostly death-doom spiked with those ethereal keys before erupting into murky blackened deathblast and swirls of carnivorous havoc. This killer combination of black metal, deathdoom, and strangely dreamy slo-mo periods of cello, glockenspiel, and synths takes the listener on a winding path of unearthly, catchy classic metal riffing, galloping tempos, ferodicous , almost punk-like bursts of mid-tempo disorder, the music swinging into ravines of massive death metal groove and bone-crushing chug, all assembled into off-kilter song structures and riff changes, and flashes of surreal, dissonant ambient keys that act like a toxic mortar for the band's relentlless attack. And the eleven somgs definitely deliver an assault, lead singer Mike Zanchelli spewing his hideous, almost monotone toad-croak with some seriously pissed-off sounding energy, and every riff and groove hammered into the earth with muscular, indomitable force.

But in the midst of this, a song meerges like "Smoke Rising" with its gleaming arpeggios and shimmering cymbals, backing choral voices rising as Zanchelli's menacing whisper drifts on pained eulogies. There's a notable shift here, as the album begins a transfiguration into more rocking, lyrical forms, the later songs sounding almost reminiscent of some early 90s gothic gloom like Lycia, a heavy darkwave vibe emerging and coalescing with the inherent heaviness and aggression; it's one of my favorite moments on Yuggoth. It gets even more intense as the ethereal, mournful atmopshere shifts again into a masssive doom dirge at the end, a simple, catchy hook grinding away at the light. There's more glimmering, dimly-lit gloom with the title track, a brief instrumental piece that unfolds into chorus-tinged guitars unwinding minor key sorrow over droning keys for a moment. There's also these great, melancholy baritone vocals from keyboardist Don Zaros that become another presence in Yuggoth's progression, contrasting nicely with Zanchelli's vicious blackened growl; that combo moves through the rest of the songs. This shift is unexpected and haunting, transforming "Beyond The Scree" and "The Infinite Talisman" into a kind of dark, withering, gnarled gothic rock underscored by the band's metallic power, the stately, world-weary mood and meditative groove evoking Fields Of The Nephilim's later work, the more accessible My Dying Bride songs, even some of Enslaved's more recent rock-influenced sound. That deep, yearning singing amid Dimentianon's abrasiveness definitetly reminds me of Eld-era Enslaved, but the comparison stops there. These guys craft all of this into something more harsh and erosive, finally moving from that ominous, gothy slowness into the most ruinous deathdoom of the album on "The Path Less Travelled", then closing with a piano and synth instrumental that's evocative of some old European folk song.

This album is epic. That mixture of black / death metal and deathdoom with those gloriously somber darkwave elements and how the band merges then together really turns the whole thing into something rather unique.

A-side "Eight Letters" comes on friehgt-truck style, a flurry of bone-bashing drum rolls and gnarly distortion right before Dove quickly recombine into a fuckin' massive sludge-metal riff, somewhat akin to the early Sleep stuff but with that recognizeable bellowing vocal style that marked the early Floor releases. It's more churn than drone, a punchy chorus rising up and down out of the halting riffing, slamming your skull into the mulch for ahile before it disintegrates intp a wall of feedbak, out of which comes an unexpected pretty guitar melody. This tune really reminds me of the early, rougherr Floor stuff with its killer contrast between earthmover slo-mo power and gentle melody. The whole latter half od this song has an almost Codeine-like majesty to it, these guys some of the few musicians who were able to tap into that unioque style and feel. The ending of "Letters" is achingly beautiful, tapping into something strange, a nostlagic glow that wraps around you in a vast, fuzz-filled blanket of sound.

They go a little harder on the flip "What Is Best In Life", the title of which should resonate with any of you Conan-fanatics out there. It's more of a knuckledragger of Sabbathian-style minimalism and crushing downtuned angst - nothin' drowsy or doped-out with this, the guitars are set in comncrete, those awesome gang voccals howling over the slithering six-ton groove, while still winding some of those signature arpgeggiated chords around the calmer moments, combining chorus-drenched mega-crunch with that monumental melodic pull. Epic. It's a cosmic tragefy that these didn't bloom into an entire album.

     Back in stock.

More or less an alter ego of Philly black noise merchants T.O.M.B., Dreadlords emerged a couple of years ago with a uniquely blackened, fucked-up take on ancient blues and folk music, first appearing with a demo that was one of the strangest sounds I'd come across. As a longtime fan of T.O.M.B.'s ghastly black industrial noisescapes, I had certain preconceptions of what another project from those guys would sound like, but they were shattered against the murky, incantatory power of "Going To The Well", still one of my favorite songs from this project, a strange bit of blown-out gothic scum-blues hammered out on amplified banjo that sounded like some deranged cross between Danzig and the murky low-fi cigar-box weirdness of the Negromancy crowd.

     The 'Lords finally delivered their first full-length Death Angel, issued on King Dude's label Not Just Religious Music, and it featured almost all of the stuff from that 2013 demo along with a bunch of new songs, and they're all spectacularly fucked up blots of shambling, hallucinatory madness. It's equal parts ancient devilpunk a la some demented take on Bad Seeds-style gutter blues punk, outsider blues and rumbling black noise, a bizarre concoction served up in mostly short blasts of dank, dark blackness, the growled vocals drifting over the reverb-draped sound of distant electric guitar and primitive percussion, hand drums and tortured banjo, all sounding like you're hearing some whiskey-drunk deathcult whipping themselves into a sweaty fervor in some blighted roadhouse on the edge of a charred wasteland. There's also stuff like "I Live In A Cemetery" that sounds like primitive black metal being played by derelict hillbillies on busted guitars, broken amplifiers and someone banging on a ratty, hand-made drum; and the title track works a grittier, more soulful vocal delivery around ominous acoustic guitar, smears of far-off synth and the rattling of bones, almost like some wretched Nephilim-esque death-folk. The album has a hollow, distant feel to the instruments, like you're hearing them clanking and buzzing up from beneath the floorboards, a ramshackle atmosphere that evokes their visions of snake-handlers, Appalachian devil-cults and backwoods blasphemy.

A new 2017 repress, on magenta and blue starburst vinyl.

Elder's latest slab of swirling downbeat metal follows up their Dead Roots Stirring album with a two-song ascent into more atmospheric territory. Released on vinyl only, the record begins with "Spires Burn", a slow-burning epic with all of the ingredients that make Elder one of the best current doom bands here in the States: those clear, powerful vocals that mesh perfectly with the soaring psychedelic leads and triumphant riffage so imbued with an aura of classic heavy metal; the sudden pitches into seriously-dark Sabbathian creep that the band contrasts with their slightly sunnier, more fist-raising anthemic moments; the swirling space-rock effects that come sweeping over the burning towers and scorched wastelands alluded to in the lyrics; and of course, the absolutely CRUSHING riffage that evokes the meditative bulldozer crush of Sleep. And this song is some of the most rocking stuff I've ever heard from these guys, with some moves into grungy, shoegazy textures toward the end that sort of reminds me of a much heavier Smashing Pumpkins riff.

Then there's the beginning to the second side, where "Release" opens up with an amazing melodic intro that's all cascading clean guitars and dreamy, chiming melody - its goddamn fantastic. This swirling melody works its way into the main part of the song as the whole band locks into this killer Kyuss-esque psych-crush that's equal parts soaring, occult-tinged rock and pulverizing Sabbathian low-end, the guitars spinning out these killer melodic leads later in the song that fall somewhere between Josh Homme and J. Mascis. Elder have never sounded so accessible as they do here, but it's simply based on the strength of the songwriting, definitely a big step up from their debut album. The doom is still in here, its just skillfully contrasted with a dark jangly rock sound that comes together just about perfectly on this record. One of the best new doom releases for 2012 alongside the new Pallbearer album.

      One of Final Exit's best releases gets a sweet vinyl release via Maryland noisepunk label SPHC, newly re-mastered and presented on a single-sided 12" in gatefold packaging that replicates the design of the original release. The short, twelve-song EP originally came out back in 2008 as a 3" CD on the American label Rage For All, and quickly became one of our favorite noisecore releases of the decade; nearly ten years later, Seasons still delivers an ecstatic frenzy, a mini-masterwork from this long running Japanese band that showcases their often-humorous, always intense rapid-fire cutup compositions at their finest. Limited to five hundred copies.

      Here's our original review of the CD: It's wild to see that this Japanese noisecore band is still around - the guitar and drums duo of Hisao and Ryohei have been at it since 1994, surely outliving almost every other band that formed in the wake of Anal Cunt. They even appeared on the double CD compilation Not Without A Fight that Crucial Blast released at the beginning of the decade. Final Exit are still raging though, and they've dropped this eleven minute EP on us to prove that they are one of the best blurrcore outfits in the biz. Unlike most bands that took cues from Anal Cunt and the early noisecore scene, Final Exit have evolved beyond the pure grinding blur of their earlier releases and have taken a more experimental, genre-hopping approach to their micro-blasts that takes its cues from Naked City's classic Torture Garden album. On this new 3" CD, all kinds of musical clusterbombs are tossed in with their blown out grindnoise; surf rock, electronica, infectious indie-pop jangle, covers of Iron Maiden's "Aces High" and Complex's "Be My Baby", gooey doom, No Neck style clatter, hardcore punk, 50's greaser vibes, jazz chords, and stretched out spans of Cageian silence are all interspersed with their savage blurry blasts of Anal Cunt style grindnoise and harsh Japanoise skree. Weird, spastic, glorious stuff, issued in a beautiful miniature gatefold jacket with full color photos of seasonal landscapes and Japanese folks on vacation in keeping with the seasonal theme of the EP.

The pefect palette cleanser for all rational thought. The Brutal Accidents / Hail Cliff! Fuck Riffs!! is actually one of a handful of collaborations and splits that these two bands have done together, and here they comkpliment each other's noxious anti-musical blurr perfectly. This is classick-style old-school noisecore, but with both Final Exit and Sedem Minut Strachu showing how even this sort of borderline Dadaist audio-violence can be expressed in a myriad of ways.

Final Exit's side is a grenade blast of lunatic hyperspeed absurdity, chopped up into five songs humorously titled like "Kamikaze Attacked The Gym" and "Party, Angry And Lack Of Sleep". These Japanese weirdos have been at this since 1994, actually appearing on one a compilation that was one of the earliest Crucial Blast releases ever. So I've been a fan of this stuff for awyhile. Known amongst noisecore fanatics for their ability to blown open the boundries of total blurr into moments of ridicculous but adeptly performwed disco music, surf rock, pop melody, and heavy metal, it always a brainfuck listening to 'em. Amphetimine speed-chaos disinitegrates into fucked-up ska parts before morphing into an utterly hwellish feedback-drilling vat of blackened sludge a la Corrupted. Pretty pop punk jangle explodes into pure blurr in a matter of seconds. There are a couple of grueling sludgecore sections included among the acoustic guitar strum, three-second noisecore blasts, bursts of crossover thrash riffing, and hideous roiling low-end noise. Fuckin' brilliant - like I've mentioned in the past, it seems evident that these two guys are hardcore Naked City fans, but attack their bizarro blast with total punk abandon. It's pretty wild what they do here in five minutes with just guitar and drums (and those sickoid shrieking gibbon gibberish vocals, of course).

Far more murky, low-fi and downright barbaric, Sedem Minút Strachu simply belt out a single untitled five and a hhalf minute piece of bass-heavy (and I mean heavy blurr. This stuff sounds monstrous, moving from the absurd thousand mile per hour blasts of incompreggensible chaos to mid-tempo punk to splatters of rumbling bass noise. From all appearances, this is an ode to bass-god Cliff Burton, and there are a shitload of wrecked Metallica riffs that keep surfacing out of the cranked-up concrete-mixer caveman pandemonium. There is some very weird shit going on with the vocals, with what sounds like some kind of actual singing going on in the background when they aren't howling and barking like animals. Knowing Sedem Minút Strachu from their other releases, this has got to be mostly improvised noisecore aside from those totally berserk Metallica motifs that keep popping up, but even when this side is going at full velocity, it can have this feeling of "complexity" that is sort of unique to theser guys. It's awesome.

     At last got around to stocking this impressive new album from Boston's Forn, now that it's gotten a second pressing (sans the striking obi band that wrapped around the jacket for the first edition of the LP). This album has been steadily amassing accolades from both press and purchasers since coming out this past summer, due to it's powerful take on atmospheric doom metal, delivering a six-song set of glacial gloom and scorched-earth ambience that blends in just the right amount of grinding industrial-tinged soundscapery to transport this music into an upper echelon of sonic dread.

     The album's intro track is entirely instrumental, weaving grating factory-rumble loops around swells of severely downtuned guitar and enshrouding it all in a heavy black fog of end time dread, but it's the second song "Dweller On The Threshold" that really bulldozes across your soul, with a massive gravitational pull emanating from the band's massive guitar sound and the strength of the rhythm section as they lumber, heavy enough to rival any other new doom metral album that came out towards the end of 2014, but those stately guitar melodies that these guys wind around the imposing slo-mo heaviosity really tower over this album, unfurling twin guitar harmonies and demented licks that puts 'em in a similar league as the likes of Thou, Asunder and Samothrace. But Forn also incorporate more of a black metal influence throughout this record as well, with the songs sometimes rupturing into violent blackened riffery and gales of frostbitten blastbeat drumming that flow fluidly out of their crushing torpor. Really immense stuff that gazes into the void, surrounded by susurrant sighs and coldly gleaming starlight. Tracks like "Gates Of The Astral Plane" coupling utterly bone-rattling low-end rumble with elegiac arrangements, and the plaintive, Godspeed You Black Emperor-esque passages on "Suffering In The Eternal Void" that erupt into titanic dirge are all quite moving. Deserving of the attention that this album has been getting since its release. Gorgeously macabre illustrations from Natures Mortes imbue this with added power.

I've listened to previous Fornace albums here and there, the band goes back to around 2000 but have only released three albums to date; the previous stuff I've heard was a solid mixture of black and death metal centered around dark atmopsherics and catchy but malevolent riffs, drawing somewhat from the Hellenic field of pioneers like Varathron, Rotting Christ and (to a lesser extent) Necromantia. Over the yearss this Italian band developed a fairly straightforward approach to their brand of barbarous blackened violence, but Fornace always manage to throw a curveball into their listening experience that makes 'em one of the more interesting bands that I've picked up recently from the Paragon catalog. 2018's Wrath

The sheer diversity of the epic-length songs and the intricate assemblage of it all hints at an underlying progginess, but it's overshadowed by the immensity of the hypnotically repetitive passages, sharply skillful transitions, all flowing deliberately and fluidly; this easily lines up as the best album Fornace has delivered so far.

But you wouldn'y\t know it from the first song...

That opening song had me glowing. You see a title like "Experience The Joy Of Unhappiness" and you think you have a mopefest coming your way, but this first song is actually a rather unpected burst of super-catchy blackened jangle, all instrumental, huge grandiose major chords roaring in the dying twilight, the main chord progressions having that infectious punk quality that Ghost Kommando, Wóddréa Mylenstede and some of the Peste Noir stuff has, a quirky melodicism that flies in the face of the album's visual aesthetics yet works ferrociously as a kicker to this hour-long nocturnal rite, the song sounding like some kind of weirdly catchy energy and guitar sound that evokes early Dinosaur Jr. or Husker Du, but most definitely filtered through an abrasive, distorted, blackened aggression. The closer follows suit, "Her Beauty In Those Days" sprawling out it's strange dismal mid-paced blackened rock and alternating it with faster sections that center around the song's main melodic hook; it's "poppy" enough that I'm pretty sure fans of stuff like Alcest and Lantlos would dig the hell out of it, but doesn't sacrifice those snarling, despairing shrieks and rampaging double bass and massive amp-rumbling power. I'm a HUGE fan of stuff like this. When they break down into some of their more rocking mid-tempo sections on other songs like "Bare" and "Morti", and "Under The Bright Cursed Star" , you continue to hear a little more of that unusual open-chord melodicism, only soaked more fully and deeply into the surrounding frost-charred intensity, that vaguely "punky" stripped-down energy that bores its many earworms into your head, often fading into the distance. Another standout is "La Notte Dei Morti", were the rhythm section come to the fore and lock on this hypnotic groove that features some almost Bauhaus-esque bass guitar, everything awash in muted sheets of guitar glaze, before the band abruptly whips themselves back up into another whirlwind of heart-rending blast. But that first song, man, it's a banger.

I'm definitely a big fan of Fornace's guitar sound, it adds a nicely unique aspect to their white-hot ferocity. It's all just so goddamn catchy.

More enthralling spook-prog action from Frizzi, here soundtracking the outrageous Italian monster movie Shark (Rosso Nell'Oceano), titled Devil Fish for the foreign market, from all the way back in 1984. Unfortunately, I still haven't seen the full, uncut film outside of the butchered cut used for an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Even despite the ludicrous English dubbing and shit-tier video transfer, I still enjoyed the hell out of this gory, gonzo flick about a bizarre prehistoric "proto-shark" with tentacles terrorzing the Floridian coastline. A marine biology research base and hoppin' tourist spot, this foamy paradise is wracked by an onslaught of absurdly ultra-violent attacks from the titular titan, who just can't gobble down the toursts and scuba divers fast enough. Starring one of my all-time Italo-splat actors Michael Sopkiw (in his regular moody, man-of-action role) and French model Valentine Monnier back together again after the crazed post-apocalyctic actioner 2019, After the Fall of New York, Spaghetti Western legend Gianni Garko of Sartana fame, and frequent Jess Franco collaborator William Berger as the voice of scientific reason Professor Donald West, Devil Fish is one of Lamberto Bava's lesser efforts, but still a load of violent, goofy fun. Lots of scenic seaside footage, mid-paced action, amputations, someone named Bob, jarring tonal shifts, monster shark-induced PTSD, sordid love triangles, questionable marine biology science, frantic phone calls, tropical resort anguish, military conspiracy, comic releif from a couple of impertinent dolphins, and, naturally, bottomless pina coladas. Plus, I'm an avowed fan of the roaring, toothsome octo-shark monster design. I think it's bitchin'.

The music doesn't reach the lofty heights of classic Frizzi works for Fulci such as Zombi, The Beyond and City of the Living Dead , but it's still a rousing, infectious blast of proggy analog keyboard action, atmospheric strings and synthesizers. This album features fifteen sequences from the film score, and blend together bluesy guitar licks, yacht-rock melodies, and __________________ with Frizzi's signature use of throbbing bass guitar, swarming synths, and strange electronic flourishes. Just like you would expect from an early 80's Italo-Jaws clone, there's a bassy synth line that vaguely echoes elements of John Williams' classic theme, but Frizzi employs some interesting instrumental sounds that are a little unusual. String sections (with notable violin arrangements), chimes, and those aforementioned electric blues licks appear alongside his pulsating bass and staccato guitar, lending a romantic allure to some of the pieces. Other tracks are instantly recognizeble Frizzi jams, funk-inflected dirges and brooding piano keys atop a steady kick drum beat. There ios this one legitemately beautiful, melancholic motif that dominates the score as well, mixed in with the tense action-oriented arpeggios and slow, hypnotic electronic passages; on repeat listening, there's a chunk of this music that sounds like it would more at home on the soundtrack to a crime drama than that of a giant monster shark flick. It's straight, uncut 1980s vibe, though. While considered to be unexceptional by some film score enthusiasts, there's definitely enough Frizzi-action going on, sprinkled with just the right amount of eccentricty, to make the Shark (Rosso Nell'Oceano) a solid listen for fans of the maestro.

Early recording from FRKSE, a still-enigmatic industrial outfit from Boton-based Rajen Bhatt that's been dropping massive rhythmic beats, dark punk industrial, and sumptuous gutter drones since the mid-oughts. Mostly lurking beneath the surface of the contemporary industrial / electronics movement, most folks probably know this persistant band from his more recent records on weirdo-hardcore powerhouse Iron Lung that came out around 2020, a stamp of approval in and of itself. At the onset of FRKSE's strange activity, though, the sounds leaned more towards the minimal, debuting with a similiarly minded silk-screened jacket with a simple handwritten insert card and single sigil marking its intent. Remove presents itself as a blank slate upon first handling, although the electronic and physical elements take form and aggression as soon as the wax starts to spin.

His connections and influence stemming from interests in the underground hip-hop scene rear their head early on as well. The album runs through nine songs, most of them somewhat brief sound-sculptures, and a carefully applied mixture of sound and improvisation fuels the encroaching, potentially dystopian atmopshere that begins to roll over the album. It's hard to pick out all of the instruments being utilized here; regularly armed with samplers, synthesizers, electronic processors, and vocals, it feels like there is some bass guitar snaking through this as well. I'm reminded of the often horrifying cacophony of 80's-era Missing Foundation at times but much more subdued, but even moreso the hypno-narcoptic boom-bap of early Scorn, albeit much more ruined and damaged by the unending reverberations of random machine sounds and faceless murmurs and errant electronic gunk that makes up modern city life. Nothing with FRKSE feels derivitive though. A punk-style count-off kicks it in, that monstrous slithering bass guitar presence mobing around slow-motion beats and swirling electronic noise. "Rots The Primer" emits a claustrophobic nightmare quality, distant rhythmic loops and echoes of abused inanimate objects slowly comes together into a sinister, neurotic and totally hypnotic industrial beatscape, recorded at just the right level of low-fidelity, oozing heaviness and dehumanized structures. Ululuating muezzin-esque calls carry over breaks of pure hiss, then sink back into the lurching, murky darkhop constructions of "Engineer 1965 " and "To Fool A Brahmin", the mighty breakbeat driven tension of "Drunk On Power In The Dry State ", other songs erupting into a chaotic horror of tape-looped roiling monstrous voices and crushing bass-heavy noise. And every needle-drop feels like a sigh of resignation.

I love the whole subterranean vibe of FRKSE's music here, sounding as if is occuring in some dead-end alley after midnight, a fusion of ritual and release, moments of fleeting transcendent beauty breaking off the surf of the musical churn and abrasive textures. But even at those flashes of almost post-rock like melody, FRKSE keeps the experienced anchored to an atmopshere of gleaming asphalt and distamt rumbling dumptrucks doing their rounds in the darkness, forgotten voices dissipating into manholes cracked slightly ajar, carving an inescapable, sludgy groove though the extremes of urban blight and intense isolation. This album has haunted me for awhile. It's long sold-out from the label, just a few copies left here on the shelf, but if any of those references or the power of the recent Iron Lung Records releases capture your nervous system and current anxieties as they've done to me, Remove comes recommended in all of its handmade, gritty obscurity.

      That second disc that appeared with the skull-shredding collaboration between Baltimore grindbeasts Full Of Hell and Japanese noise legend Merzbow has finally made its way to vinyl. That double disc album that originally came out on Profound Lore was one of the fiercest fusions of extreme electronic noise and metallic chaos to come out that year; the Sister Fawn recording that followed the album proper was an interesting shift in sound, transforming the frenzied grindcore into something much more abstract.

      While the Sister Fawn disc was initially presented as something more of a companion piece, it actually holds up wuite nicely as an album all on its own. In fact, I gotta admit I thought this material is even cooler than the first half of their collaboration. Over the course of these five tracks, much of Full Of Hell's screeching grindmetal becomes absorbed into a cacophonous wall of industrial violence, their metallic aggression subsumed into Merzbow's swirling, screeching nebula. The tracks are longer, venturing into pummeling industrial junk-metal rhythms and howling feedback manipulation, blasts of crushing power electronics and more of that abject Swans-esque dirge that appeared on the first half. And squalls of apocalyptic jazz-infected noise erupt across tracks like "Crumbling Ore", delivering an acrid blast of sound that approaches Borbetomagus-like levels of intensity. The grindcore elements are still in here though, particularly on songs like the noise-damaged blast-assault of "Merzdrone" that welds a seemingly endless blastbeat to Merzbow's scorching electronics and shrill skulldrill distortion. The result is ferociously and psychedelic.

      Issued in a one-time pressing of one thousand copies on black vinyl.

Funeral Orchestra's stuff on physical format has been a real challenge for me to get my mitts on, and from what I can tell, most of their stuff is out of print right now. Nuclear War Now's recent release of Negative Evocation Rites is to be applauded, then, 'cuz when it comes to the sound of funeral doom stripped down all the way to its dessicated, rat-chewed skeletal remains, this is what you get. Real horror music, titanic-length songs that shed any indication of romanticism that you would have heard on the progenitatorss of the genre, instead sticking with a very raw death metal ugliness that is reduced to the most turgid tempos possible without leaving the realm of actual metal completely. When they describe this stuff as "minimal", they mean it; Rudolfsson and his crew drag that tempo on their albums down to the most base metronommic pulse, a glacial, twenty BPM megalith pushed forward by tight (it ain't easy staying in the pocket when you're playing at this level of slowness, you know?) and mammoth drum work alongside a gut-rumbling bass presence. But that backdrop of bilious, slow motion, downtruned power reveals itself as a canvas for the band's awesome atmospheric murals of complete sonic death and decay, with the guitars and synthesizers winding and wrapping around that trance-inducing rhythmic structure like heaps of rotten priestly cerements, heavily stained burial shrouds, and the rags of sweat-soaked keriah, the rent and ripped garments of funereal mourners.

The four songs that make up Negative Evocation Rites virtually stink of the open tomb, each massive piece of funereal doom crawling out of crumbled stone and toppled monuments with only a riff or three, never really changing tempo once furing the whole experience, but seriously burying you beneath that sodden gravitational weight and tear-stained guitar melodies, decimating droning chord progressions and searing electronic beams. This continuation of the ghastly ambient death metal of classic rot-bangers like Slow Shalt Be The Whole Of The Law and Feeding The Abyss from the 2000s sounds like the band hasn't missed any time at all, still grinding through these signature processionals with an agonizing level of heaviness. Each song reaches upwards of ten minutes or longer on average, but it's neve boring: guitars weave an array of eerie melodies, strange discordant chord forms, sickly single-note leads that bend in an almosy weirdly bluesy way before getting hammered back down by that incessant glacial crush.

I've mentioned it elsewhere when writing about Funeral Orchestra, and it still stands true to me: the stuff on this album like "Negative Evocations", "Flesh Infiltrations" and the two-part epic "Negations" blare forth some unholy but magesterial melodies and swarming blackened tremelo-blurred picking amongst the gruesome droning churn of the guitars ad bass, and those vile, lich-like shrieks and roars that drift all throughout the album. It's fuckin' awesome, vast and miserable but augemnted with these huige-sounding hymn-like male vocals and priestly chanting all off in the distance, and those keyboards, man, that synthesizer only gets pulled out at key moments here, but when it shows up, it looms over the rest of the music, this weirdly kosmische wave of electronic distortion sweeping over it all, or sometimes taking the shape as a bleary, barely-perceptible Hammond organa-esque buzz in the background that twists the creep-knob up to ten. It's that psychedelic ghastliness that distinguishes Funeral Orchestra's sound, which goes completely nuts with the final song as all of those elements melt together just as the drummers abruptly drop in this gargantuan militaristic drumming that sounds like something off a Triarii or Arditi performance, leading into a weird, exquisitely trippy finale.

This self-described "garage band" from McAllen, Texas showed up on my radar earlier this year and comprehensively smashed my skull into fragments. Looking back at the Youtube upload that the band did for their debut Noumenal Field Recordings EP (released online at the very end of 2022), I had commented the following: "...holy fucking shit, is this awesome.

Like someone crammed early Sore Throat, Harry Pussy, and The Stooges into a malfunctioning Cuisinart. I'm in heaven .". You know what? I'm still in heaven.

Sink your teeth into this hunk of rotted meat. The Noumenal Field Recordings EP hits physical media for the first time here, paired with the previously unreleased Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) EP, and both sides of this machine will fuck you right up. Just like I spewed all over that video comment section months ago, Noumenal Field Recordings rips through eleven songs of blown-out aggression that effortlessly walk the line between classic early 80s three-chord hardcore and heavy doses of Brainbombs / GG Allin - level sludge-punk barbarity that you can smell from here. Onto that feral sonic assault, the band wields feedback-screaming slabs of freeform noise rock in the Harry Pussy vein, blurts of brain-damaged Casio weirdness, obnoxiously catchy hooks, and barbs of clotted noisecore that hit and run faster than you can even try to catch the plates. This shit is no joke, even when it sounds like the band is having an absolute blast. That first EP is so ugly, so mangled, so fucked up, and yet so weirdly literate, with nods to Nick Land, Marx and Thoreau. The lyrics are fantastic, too. Which is doubly confusional since it seems that these songs were written on the spot, recorded live and apparently totally off-the-cuff and improvised in that aforementioned McAllen garage. Blows me away.

And that B-side Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) is even weirder and more scathing. More shit-fi droning HC and shreiking, bloodthirsty vocals collide with bizarre backing roars and inexplicable noise, sampled speeches giving way to boombox-grade ur-punk, every riff and every bass note sounding like it'll give you tetanus if you scratch yourself on 'em, the drumming weirdly mixed with an echoing effect (perhaps simply due to the utterly and awesomely atrocious recording approach. Fleeting moments of lobotomized thrash break apart against shrill noisecore that goes so hard at 1,000 mile per hour velocity that it all turns into a delicious mush, only for another one of Gasket's wickedly catchy hooks to stumble out of the carnage. That side culminates with the unholy power electronics / improvised destruction of "Hole In The Head", a previously stand-alone track from Gasket that I begged them to include on this slab.

The Noumenal Field Recordings / Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) cassette comes in kraft-brown j-cards befitting the look of the original digital uploads, issued in a limited edition of 100 copies.

Unfortunately short-lived (operating from 2007 to 2012 and then momentarily reuniting in 2016), this Nebraska band delivered some excellent (if underheard) old-school heavy metal that cites the sort of influences that make my withered heart sing: surrounding themselves with their collective appreciation of traditional doom metal, 70's/early 80's-era progressive rock, New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, and ancient horror films, Ghost Tower does a fine job at crafting the kind of spooky, vintage-sounding metal that you'd easily expect to hear coming from Minotauro or Cruz Del Sur Records. With specific musical influences like Mercyful Fate and Black Sabbath fueling the sound of their eerie vision, the music on Head Of Night is total time-warp metal, transporting you to an alternate 1982 as soon as the opening strains of "Ninth Tooth Of The Gravekeeper's Grin" start to drift off the album. Out of all of the Paragon releases that I recently picked up, this might be my favorite alongside the latest Dimentianon. Packing in mood and might for nearly an hour, these folks hammer down twelve high-quality songs of haunted heaviness that are made all the more menacing thanks to the weird and witchy lead vocals of frontwoman Ameven. Her voice is tough, raw and unpolished, which I really dig, and materializes into all kind of angusihed moans and some surprisingly King Diamond-esque howls (the Mercyful Fate influence is pretty strong with these folks); those vocals are contrasted with more abrasive, gruff screaming from both her and multi-instrumentalist Matt Preston, amnd also drop some off-kilter harmonies here and there.

The album is a slab of primo throwback misery metal, and oh is crawling with riffs, massive riffs, galloping fast-paced riffs galore on stuff like opener "Ninth Tooth Of The Gravekeeper's Grin" (which sounds like it could have come off some little-known British 12" import at the height of the NWOBHM, the heroic melodic leads screaming over their burly palm-muted power hymns. The track titles alone glow with occult mysstery and vintage horror visions ("Secret Of Black Moss Lake", "House Of Wary Shadows", "Scroll Of The Lunar Tribe") and that air of menace and darkness sinks into every song. And it blows my hair back when they suddenly downshift from that rapid-fire riffing and rocking tempo into some cavernois trad-doom heaviness, Ameven's husky singing rising over these killer church organ-style keys and swirling clouds of slow-motion spookiness. And those doom-laden moments are often crushing, with massive chugging, battering-ram riffs hitting like a sledgehammer. The proggier qualities become more and more apparent as you make your way through the album, encountering sudden, technical riff changes, a few wild time changes, extended lead guitar fireworks, passages of Hammond-esque sound and tricky effects-draped guitars and offbeat synth runs tangled on the instrumental "Brooding Silence" and maudlin closer "Elegy Of Dreamtime". All of that stuff floats quite nicely together, giving some ghostly ambience that surrounds the riff-fest and shredding that make up so much of Head Of Night and its rough, almost garagey production that also helps in giving it all an older, more classic early 80's sensibility. I'm usually a sucker for anyone that blends vintage trad doom and prog influences, and these folks deliver with their own gritty, slightly gnarly signature carved right into the heavy metal attack. Along with that obvious Fate element, the Tower is also reminiscent of cult heavy metallers Twisted Tower Dire, as well as touches of Judgement Of The Dead-era Pagan Altar, hints of Reager-period Vitus, and to a lesser degree, more contemporary femme-fronted doom metal bands like Witch Mountain and Windhand. And it sounds sincere as fuck, which goes a long way to endear this style of metal to me. The roughness of the vocals and Ghost Tower's odd proggy quirks and sometimes jarring stylistic shifts might be something of an acquired taste, perhaps. But if you're a fanatic for that aforementioned field of classic early 1980's power and majesty, man, this album's got it.

This Paragon CD reissue features an additional trio of songs at the end: a pair of songs recorded in 2010 ("My Dear Killer" and the weird experimental creepiness of "Whispers From Beyond"), and a 2008 demo track "Sable Beldam" that busts out some ripping lo-fi speed metal.

A shambling monstrosity Woven from charred bones and infernal technology, stitched with gristle and exposed wiring. Hymns For The Broken, Swollen And Silent lurches like a grotesque assemblage of tortured flesh and mangled machinery, revealing the latest nightmare from Dutch fiend Gnaw Their Tongues. After more than a decade, the band continues to disturb with its uniquely dark and depraved blend of black metal, industrial and noise, and the eight-song Hymns shows Gnaw Their Tongues to be in prime killing mode.

Coming in the wake of a series of live performances starting in 2015, this new material from GTT mastermind Mories (Seirom, Cloak Of Altering, Mors Sonat) seems to find him tapping into a heavier, more violent rhythmic element as well as a more pronounced use of synthesizers, producing yet another step in the evolution of GTT's sound. Throughout the album, the harsh drum programming offers a mixture of cacophonous blast beats and grueling, glacial detonations; the sickening, tumescent groove that surges through "Hold High The Banners Of Truth Among The Swollen Dead" resembles something approximating a vile chopped n' screwed dubstep / blackened doom abomination, while on tracks like "Speared Promises", it slips into a hideously dissonant deathcrawl where those drums almost seem to be shorting out. Elsewhere, "Frail As The Stalking Lions" contorts into hellishly warped synth-sludge, and the hallucinatory weirdness of the title track delves into a black pit of ghastly ambience, gleaming synth and malfunctioning, off-time drum programming, which becomes possessed by bizarre operatic vocals that drift amid the anguished shrieking.

Through all of this, the band's signature use of unsettling samples and blasts of orchestral power is woven through the mix, turning each track into a seething mass of claustrophobic horror. Eruptions of ultra-frenzied blackened blast and floor-shaking depth-charge reverberations, ravenous, psychotic vocals and swells of choral despair, distorted electronics and gut-churning bass riffs, mournful horns and weirdly layered female operatic singing - yeah, Hymns delivers on the promise of chaotic horror that one expects from Gnaw Their Tongues, evoking foul, corrupted imagery while also (as usual) streaked with striking moments of warped, morbid beauty.

CD edition comes in a gatefold digisleeve.

Back in stock on CD and LP, the vinyl version with an additional two exclusive tracks.

Time flies. It's been fifteen years since the last Goatsnake album, though it feels like just yesterday that I was getting flattened by the titanic blues-doom heaviosity of Flower Of Disease. It's indeed been a decade and a half since the L.A. doom rock heavies dropped their modern masterpiece of American doom metal Flower Of Disease, with a long hiatus interrupted with brief spurts of activity between, but after all this time Goatsnake are back, and with a monstrous set of tunes that sounds like there's been no downtime at all. These guys are my favorite American doom metal outfit as a matter of fact, so to hear them return with a roar of triumph with the appropriately titled Black Age Blues remains one of the musical highlights of 2015 for myself; over the course of their previous two albums Goatsnake crafted some of the catchiest, heaviest Sabbathian music I've ever heard, like some monstrous, sludge-encrusted blend of The Cult and Sabbath, and that powerful sound is in full force on their comeback album. In Pete Stahl, Goatsnake boast one of the finest frontmen to ever swing the mic in a doom metal outfit, his powerful, soaring singing and weathered, Astbury-esque croon offers a perfect contrast with the soul-flattening Sabbath-on-steroids might of their music, and he sounds more world-weary than ever with these songs.

There's a poignancy to how the album opens, beginning with fading echoes of the song "The River" that ended Flower Of Disease, leaving no doubt that the band is picking up exactly where they left off fifteen years ago. And as they slide into the pulverizing elephantine crush of "Another River To Cross", it's as if no time has elapsed at all, the band's signature down-tuned doom rock as molten and menacing as it has ever sounded, and singer Stahl sounds utterly unweathered, his honeyed, soulful croon taking flight across the song's bluesy, slow-motion crawl. It's a hell of a comeback, displaying the same impeccable level of songwriting acumen as the previous album, syrupy yet bone-grinding guitar tone, the rhythm section swerves and swings expertly , laying down titanic grooves amid some sneaky off-kilter time signature changes and edgy, stuttering rhythms, while heightening some of their more unique influences, with elements of gospel, soul and southern blues all seeping into these songs; they break out the harmonica again on the massive Sabbathoid "Elevated Man" before careening through the garagey rocker while tossing off armloads of bludgeoning riff-grenades. On "Coffee & Whiskey", they hammer down on a mammoth gluey heaviness that would flatten the ugliest sludgecore outfit, but can follow it up with the rollicking biker-doom perfection of the title track, a slow-mo shimmy that's as ominous yet infectious as the saurian boogie of their last album. There's some great use of backing gospel-style vocals on "House Of The Moon", and "Jimi's Gone" is a skull-smashing blues-metal earworm that oozes around yet another massive magmatic hook and more of those terrific all-female backing R&B vocals from the trio Dem Preacher's Daughters. It's all so goddamn heavy, it's almost overwhelming, with Anderson dropping sledgehammer riffs that most metalcore bands would lose a limb for, while strafing you with his searing, asthmatic solos that lash out like barbed wire from the tarpit heart of these tracks, and yet still throws some new twists into their sound, everything a little more rhythmically complex than before, the tone darker and more sinister. A great goddamn comeback from these guys.

Back in stock on CD and LP, the vinyl version with an additional two exclusive tracks.

Time flies. It's been fifteen years since the last Goatsnake album, though it feels like just yesterday that I was getting flattened by the titanic blues-doom heaviosity of Flower Of Disease. It's indeed been a decade and a half since the L.A. doom rock heavies dropped their modern masterpiece of American doom metal Flower Of Disease, with a long hiatus interrupted with brief spurts of activity between, but after all this time Goatsnake are back, and with a monstrous set of tunes that sounds like there's been no downtime at all. These guys are my favorite American doom metal outfit as a matter of fact, so to hear them return with a roar of triumph with the appropriately titled Black Age Blues remains one of the musical highlights of 2015 for myself; over the course of their previous two albums Goatsnake crafted some of the catchiest, heaviest Sabbathian music I've ever heard, like some monstrous, sludge-encrusted blend of The Cult and Sabbath, and that powerful sound is in full force on their comeback album. In Pete Stahl, Goatsnake boast one of the finest frontmen to ever swing the mic in a doom metal outfit, his powerful, soaring singing and weathered, Astbury-esque croon offers a perfect contrast with the soul-flattening Sabbath-on-steroids might of their music, and he sounds more world-weary than ever with these songs.

There's a poignancy to how the album opens, beginning with fading echoes of the song "The River" that ended Flower Of Disease, leaving no doubt that the band is picking up exactly where they left off fifteen years ago. And as they slide into the pulverizing elephantine crush of "Another River To Cross", it's as if no time has elapsed at all, the band's signature downtuned doom rock as molten and menacing as it has ever sounded, and singer Stahl sounds utterly unweathered, his honeyed, soulful croon taking flight across the song's bluesy, slow-motion crawl. It's a hell of a comeback, displaying the same impeccable level of songwriting acumen as the previous album, syrupy yet bone-grinding guitar tone, the rhythm section swerves and swings expertly , laying down titanic grooves amid some sneaky off-kilter time signature changes and edgy, stuttering rhythms, while heightening some of their more unique influences, with elements of gospel, soul and southern blues all seeping into these songs; they break out the harmonica again on the massive Sabbathoid "Elevated Man" before careening through the garagey rocker while tossing off armloads of bludgeoning riff-grenades. On "Coffee & Whiskey", they hammer down on a mammoth gluey heaviness that would flatten the ugliest sludgecore outfit, but can follow it up with the rollicking biker-doom perfection of the title track, a slow-mo shimmy that's as ominous yet infectious as the saurian boogie of their last album. There's some great use of backing gospel-style vocals on "House Of The Moon", and "Jimi's Gone" is a skull-smashing blues-metal earworm that oozes around yet another massive magmatic hook and more of those terrific all-female backing R&B vocals from the trio Dem Preacher's Daughters. It's all so goddamn heavy, it's almost overwhelming, with Anderson dropping sledgehammer riffs that most metalcore bands would lose a limb for, while strafing you with his searing, asthmatic solos that lash out like barbed wire from the tarpit heart of these tracks, and yet still throws some new twists into their sound, everything a little more rhythmically complex than before, the tone darker and more sinister. A great goddamn comeback from these guys.

Warehouse find of the original, still-sealed cassette edition of Songs, which features the same track listing as the LP version.

Ever since these Brits dropped their classic debut Streetcleaner on an unsuspecting underground in the late 80's, Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green continued to carve out their own unique language of pummeling riffage and unbelievably crushing drum machine programming, developing their sound into something that became increasingly obsessed with repetition and rhythm. The drum machine was one of Godflesh's most prominent identifyers, anchoring the hypnotic chugging bass and discordant riffage to a machine-like grind that took the Swans influence into even heavier, mechanistic territory, and there were few bands back then that came anywhere close to matching the sheer fucking heaviness of Godflesh. So when the band came out with Songs Of Love And Hate in 1996 and introduced their first album with an actual flesh-and-blood drummer behind the kit, it was surprising, as if the band was suddenly turning into an actual "rock" band.

The drummer on Songs... is Brian Mantia, one of the founding members of the avant-funk/metal supergroup Praxis and a former member of Bay Area funk rockers Limbomaniacs (am I the only person that actually remembers that band?), and here he lays down a massive breakbeat-heavy groove across the eleven songs, pumping old school hip-hop beats with steroids and creating an undercurrent of pummeling industrial rhythms that are funkier than anything Godflesh had recorded up to this point. It ain't no fun, though, as the entire album seethes with a dystopian negativity that stretches from the hallucinatory image of the statue of Christ against a backdrop of a twilight nightmare world of endless cemeteries and fire-belching factories that is featured as the album cover, to the jackhammer endtime anthems like "Sterile Prophet", "Circle Of Shit", "Angel Domain", and "Frail". The guitars are MASSIVE, Broadrick's detuned guitar grinding out huge quasi-Sabbath riffs locked into infinite trance-states, and clusters of atonal chords that churn and squeal like gears in some hellish machinery. Greene's bass grooves slither through each track, a menacing monolithic low-end presence that never relents. Jesus, this stuff is still as heavy as ever, a paranoid, apocalyptic vision sculpted out of industrial hip-hop rhythms and harsh slow-motion riffage. Essential.

Back in stock, super limited quantities.
    

For many children of the 80's like myself, Mary Lambert's 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Sematary was a psyche-wrecking blast of cinematic nihilism that's haunted us ever since. A nasty riff on the classic short story "The Monkey's Paw", Pet Sematary would go down as the bleakest of King's works, and while the film version was far from perfect, it certainly had it's moments of skin-crawling dread and nightmarish horror, as well as moments of utter soul-crushing sadness. All of this was accompanied by an often terrifying score from contemporary classical composer Elliot Goldenthal, which has been reissued by the folks at Mondo in a new twenty-fifth anniversary vinyl edition. And his score is stunning, incorporating many of the experimental techniques that his work had been known for, blending piano and orchestral strings with searing electronic synthesizers and the terrifying sound of the Zarathustra Boys Chorus; the score shifts like a darkening dream from the early. lighter pastoral pieces into sequences of soul-blackening dread as guttural cellos are scraped and strangled beneath sheets of dissonant strings, while stretches of jet-black synthdrone unfurl beneath the childlike schoolyard children's chorals and plaintive, sorrowful piano arrangements. There are parts of Goldenthal's score that, removed from the horrifying visuals of Mary Lambert's adaptation, sound like some terrifying fusion of modern classical and industrial ambient; it gradually builds in intensity as the story makes its way to the pessimistic, disturbing climax, with blasts of industrial-strength percussion and atonal strings injecting harrowing sonic violence into the proceedings, utilizing noise and atonality. Some of this is somewhat reminiscent of Philip Glass's work, but while one can also hear echoes of Hermann, Jack Nitzsche's work on The Exorcist, and Penderecki, but this never sounds derivative. And all of this would be perfectly perfect all in its own, but this reissue plops a big old cherry on top by including the two key Ramones songs from the film at the end of the record, their theme song being one of my all-time favorite Ramones songs.

     A high point in the intersection of modern avant-garde music and horror soundtrack work, and quite enjoyable on it's own as a particularly frightening piece of contemporary orchestral music, especially in this gorgeously re-mastered reissue, which includes a bunch of tracks that were never previously released on vinyl, and all sounds absolutely stunning on 180 gram vinyl. Something of an unsung gem in 80's horror cinematic music. One of my top favorite Mondo horror reissues so far. And the artwork - man, this has one of the coolest Lp designs I've seen out of the recent soundtrack resurgence, Mike Saputo's newly commissioned art is 100% eye-poppingly amazing, utilizing spot varnish printing and geomancy references to create a highly original and creative visual presentation. Please note, however, that several of the copies we received from the distributor have slight creasing on the top right corner.

This Italian import of the latest From Wisdom To Hate CD reissue took long enough to make it over here to the USA, but I finally nabbed some. Released by the reissue-heavy Punishment 18 Records, which I've fast become fond of: for whatever weird reason that the big metal labels are letting their catalog go completely out of print on physical media, Punishment 18 and its companion label MDD Records are doing the lord's work by releasing some great, high-quality reissues of avant-metal necessities like Solefald's In Harmonia Universali, Eyehategod's Dopesick, several Orphaned Land albums, and even Gorguts' other classic, Obscura.
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The packaging is a foldout twelve-panel poster cover, and includes Luc Lemay's previous liner notes for Hate from the 2014 reissues.

Here's my older write-up for the disc:

This is the fourth and last album that Gorguts put out before the band went on an indefinite hiatus in 2001 that just let up this past year when the French Canadian metallers reconvened with a new lineup that included members of Dysrhythmia and Behold The Arctopus, and was the follow-up to their career-defining masterpiece Obscura, still one of the most challenging, avant-garde death metal albums of all time. Everyone wondered how Gorguts could follow up the bizarre, ultra-dissonant alien death metal of that album, and in response the band came back with something that was part Obscura, and part old school Gorguts, dialing down some of the over-the-top skronk and atonal riff weirdness while reinstating some of the sound of their technical early 90's albums The Erosion of Sanity and Considered Dead; the result is not as challenging and far-out as the previous album, but it's still a fantastic combination of their avant-garde skronk and crushing death metal riffage.

From Wisdom To Hate is loaded with convoluted time signatures, those trademark discordant guitar chords and off-kilter dissonance, the scrapes and squeals and bizarre riff structures. The songs are assembled in strange, complex arrangements that are generally far outside of what you'd expect out of typical death metal. Angular interlaced riffs often shift and repeat over and over, like on the mind-warping atonal deathblast of opener "Inverted", and the jarring, doom-laden insanity of "Behave Through Mythos". Compared to Obscura, however, the vocals are less extreme, with frontman / mastermind Luc Lemay delivering a deeper, more guttural vocal style compared to the psychotic wheezing screams that he emitted on the previous record.

Also of note is the lengthy "The Quest For Equilibrium", which combines some great eerie keyboards and echoing gongs that produce a strange sort of modern-classical ambience that leads into one of the album's more doom-laden moments; that sort of nod to modern composition is something that we'd hear even more of after the band started releasing newer music on Season Of Mist. Overall, though, it's a slightly more straightforward and song-focused album than its predecessor, and an essential disc for Gorguts fans (and anyone into extreme tech/prog death).

Back in stock.

Whenever I'm thinking about the spectrum of technical death metal, the idea of that style of extreme metal coexisting with actual catchy hooks and memorable songwriting in a melodic sense don't immediately leap to mind. Tech-death delivers the extremes of complexity and violence fused together, a vortex of knuckle-disintegrating fretboard sweeps, baffling chord structures, inhuman tempos, and stop-on-a-dime time changes between various time signatures, oh, hell yeah. But it's not too often that a tech-death band succeeds in conjoining those elements with a rock-solid classic heavy metal sensibility towards crafting genuinely infectious songs. When Gorod appeared, they tossed that notion out the window and proceeded to deliver some of the riveting and most catchy technical brutality in the field. In the mid-2000s, this French band belted out a series of killer prog/tech-death albums in quick succession, all on the U.S. flagship label for cutting-edge death metal, Willowtip. 2005's Neurotripsicks introduced the band's sophisticated, baroque approach to death metal, and followed that with a pretty decent amount of acclaim with 2005's Leading Vision and 2006's Process Of A New Decline. Those first three albums are high points in the prog-death arena for me and Leading Vision is probably my favorite of the bunch.

These ten tracks embellish their brand of technical, complex, in-the-zone death metal with those catchy melodic phrases and memorable songwriting, leaving their music to roll around in my head for awhile after the album's finished. It's in the same shred-stream as the previous Neurotripsicks disc, executing these confounding serpentine songs and alien shredwork via flashy fretboard sweeps, labyrinthine arpeggios and some lights-peed fret tapping that blows my mind regularly. The complicated guitarwork is backed up by machine-precision drumming and a bassist who goes off on some crazed tangents of his own, while staying laser-locked on the blasting directions each song goes flying off into. Stuttering, spasticated structures, brutalizing force, and those whacked-out time signatures put these guys up there with the hyper-calculated death of contemporaries Necrophagist, Neuraxis, and Psyopus, but Gorod also being a fuckin' ton of groove to it that alternates between djent-like syncopations, glimpses of European progressive rock influence (especially on songs like "Edaenia 2312" and "State Of Secret"), brief snatches of jazz fusion-like flourishes (there are a couple of spots on Vision that immediately reminded me of Atheist), and those galloping nods to traditional heavy metal that deliver those big, bold hooks I was talking about. Gorod knows how to rock, and that's probably the biggest thing that sets them apart from the rest of the tech-death crowd. I'm also a fan of the blocks of surreal noise collage that are used as a way to connect the songs together as if it is a continuous "suite". Actually, listening to all of this again as i type this up, I'm also reminded how weirdly "Bungle-ish" these guys can get, their idiosyncratic side often taking songs into pretty demented and surprising directions with a high level of virtuosity; there are these oddball detours into French chanson style melody, super-brief blasts of pop-like melody, five-second carnival-music meltdowns, and deliberately goofy hard rock sections mixed up with everything. It’s pretty wild.

More than fifteen years on, I still recommend this one to anybody hooked on the more bonkers side of technically intricate and form-warping death metal. The booklet for Leading Vision includes the lengthy concept story behind the music, setting it all in a kind of Voivod-ian science-fiction apocalypse, with fitting, freakish album art that was created by Gorod guitarist Mathieu and which is in a style somewhere between Giger's bio-mech nightmares and Clive Barker's outlandish line illustrations.

      Back in print on vinyl!

      Finnish avant-metal label Blood Music has really cornered the market on heavy, dark and aggressive synthwave lately, reissuing the entire back catalog from Parisian synthwave celeb Perturbator, and putting out the latest album from sci-fi electro-prog master Dan Terminus. But the most monstrous sounding synthwave to appear via Blood Music yet might be Gost, an American artist who popped up seemingly out of nowhere towards the end of 2015 and dropped this massive slab of malevolent dark synthwave on our heads. Described by the label as "1980s black metal-inspired retro slasher exploitation, starring the demonic entity Baalberith as GosT, casting ample devious nods towards Perturbator, Goblin, Justice and Bathory", this stuff is most definitely speaking my language. Granted, that overheated label blurb suggests that there might be something more metallic going on with Gost's sound (which there isn't), but the iconography is all there, with an album cover that looks like something that could have come off a death metal record, track titles like "Reign In Hell" and "Bathory Bitch", and an overall atmosphere of pending violence and apocalyptic dread.

      But the music is pure electro, another throwback to that vintage 80's-era synthesizer sound that shares a lot in common with labelmates Perturbator (who shows up here with a neat, almost Skinny Puppy-esque remix of the title track) and the equally dark Carpenter Brut. The music on Behemoth does feel a bit heavier than that stuff, though, the synths often distorted into crunchy, grinding electronic riffs, bringing a particularly filthy bass sound to this stuff that feels informed by dubstep, the drum programming heavy and pummeling, the tracks often shot up with harsh atonal stabs and weird ghostly vocal pads. It's definitely menacing stuff, a relentless pounding assault of dancefloor delirium, but like just about goddamn synthwave album, it has that one moody disco track that features a guest female vocalist, this one being "Without A Trace". It's pretty infectious, I have to admit, a blast of earworm synthpop dropped into the middle of the rest of Gost's sinister, distorted synthwave stomp. The album's best track though is the title song, which sticks out from the rest of the album with it's barrage of piercing, atonal synths and blasting demonic choral voices screaming over an insanely distorted synth riff, so heavy that it actually starts to sound like some kind of industrial metal, especially when it drops into a grinding mid-tempo groove in it's second half, producing what is easily the heaviest and most aggressive track on here. I would have loved to have heard more in that vein. Aside from that crusher, though, there's nothing here that rattles the current synthwave paradigm, but if you dig this sort of dark, nostalgic electronica as much as I do (which is a lot), Behemoth offers an excellent dose of what you're craving, with a grimmer and meaner vibe than most.